Randall Pruim
office: North Hall 284
phone: (616) 526-7113
E-mail: rpruim@calvin.edu
Students will learn and apply appropriate modeling, visualization, and data management techniques and tools to extract new knowledge and insights from data and to communicate with others. Specific tools and applications may vary. Students will use free and commercial tools, and learn about their tradeoffs. The course will also explore social, ethical, legal, and professional issues that arise in collecting, storing and analyzing data, using case studies and discussions informed by a reformed, Christian perspective.
Students successfully completing Data 303 will demonstrate that they can:
We will maintain an email list of all students registered in this class and will occasionally use it to distribute information and reminders of various things pertaining to this course. If you prefer to read your email from an account other than your Calvin student account and do not have it set up to forward automatically, send us an email with the email address you prefer.
Please check your email daily. You are responsible for any information communicated via email.
It is very helpful if you include 303 in the subject line of any email you send me. That helps me locate email from this course in a sometimes overflowing email inbox.
I’ve set up a Microsoft Team for our class. If we need to move online, we’ll use that Team for our class sessions. We can also use it for other things. I’ll usually send class announcements to both our email list and to the general channel of our Team, for example.
In addition to this home page, We will also maintain a list of web resources pertaining to this course. You are responsible for any information appearing on the course web pages. Items we have prepared and maintain online include
a calendar of daily readings, lecture topics, etc.
notes related to topics in the class
a list of homework assignments and due dates.
For quick access to these and other resources, see the navigation bar at the top of this page.
If you are having difficulty with any portion of the course, do not hesitate to contact me. Do this as soon as possible, certainly well in advance of any deadlines so that we can work to fix the problem.
There is no textbook for this course, but we will use online resources.
You should be able to access rstudio.calvin.edu using your usual Calvin credentials. I encourage you to also download and install RStudio and R on your personal computer. Both installations are straightforward. In addition, you will want to install a number of R packages. This can be done from within RStudio.
According to Tableau:
Tableau is a visual analytics platform transforming the way we use data to solve problems – empowering people and organizations to make the most of their data.
Tableau is available on the windowns machines in the Maroon and Gold labs. You can also get Tableau for students to put on your own computer.
Occasionally there are special circumstances that require that the rules and guidelines above be adjusted for a particular student. In such cases, it is the responsibility of the student to inform us of the situation as soon as possible, so that the appropriate arrangements can be made. This includes, but is not limited to, students with documented disabilities.