Dear friends, Alberto here.
The Open Visualization Academy is expanding rapidly. Today, we are announcing a new batch of instructors and courses that we’ll release in the next year or year and a half.
On May 14th, we’ll be launching ‘Feminist Data Visualization’ by Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio; by mid-June we’ll publish Kae Petrin’s ‘Critical Data Exploration with Spreadsheets’; and Enrico Bertini’s and Racquel Fygenson’s ‘How to Read Charts’ will be online around July.
After that, on a semi-monthly basis and in no particular order:
• ‘Learning Objectives for Communicative Visualizations’
by Elsie Lee-Robbins and Eytan Adar.
• ‘Design for information: Principles, Practices, and Visual Thinking’
by Isabel Meirelles.
• ‘Visualizing Small Data’
by Domiziana Ferrari.
• ‘Visualizing Data With Flourish’
by Sakina Salem.
• ‘Advanced Cartography’
by Rob Simmon.
• ‘Fundamentals of Statistics For Data Visualization’
by Cameron Riopelle.
• ‘Visualizing Loss and Tragedy’
by Alyssa Fowers.
• ‘From Paper to Digital Visual Storytelling’
by Hannah Dormido.
• ‘The Stories that Maps Can Tell’
by Ken Field.
And our own Vinicius Sueiro (Open Visualization Academy designer and front-end developer) and Melissa Strong (OVA back-end developer) are developing courses of their own. Vini is working on ‘Crafting Graphics with Javascript’ and Melissa will teach ‘Python for Data Visualization’.
These plans will take us well into the second half of 2027, I believe.
In case you’re curious about audience numbers:
• Nearly 5,200 people have registered to our website since we launched on January 30th. As I mentioned in previous newsletters, numbers like this will never cease to amaze me, as you don’t need to register to watch any of our videos.
• Of those, 878 have registered in the last 7 days alone. To me that is a sign that registrations will keep accelerating as we release new courses.
• Our average course completion rate is 23,2%. As far as I know, that is higher than the typical completion rate in other online educational platforms.
• This newsletter has 4,116 subscribers.
Please help us spread the word about the OVA. Tell friends and family members about it; my own 14-year-old son is going through Hiram Henríquez’s massive ‘Adobe Illustrator for Visualization Design’ (more than 14 hours!) these days, and he’s enjoying it quite a lot.
I like closing my newsletter posts with some music. These days I’m writing my new book —I should share some news about it in the next few months— while Silent Skies plays in the background. Here’s one of my favorite songs, ‘Taper’
