Dear friends, Alberto here.

It’s unbelievable to me that we’re just a week away from releasing the Open Visualization Academy. We’ll likely open up access by Friday the 30th, one day before the previous official launch date.

I began working on the Open Visualization Academy (OVA) more than a year ago, when I had this vague idea of a completely free educational platform about information design, data visualization, and data literacy. Since then, I’ve been lucky to gather a small and marvelous team of collaborators and a long list of contributors from all over the world—top names in the industry, people whose work I admire, and who have recorded hours and hours of master classes and software tutorials that you’ll soon enjoy.

The OVA would have not been possible without the Knight Foundation and my professional home, the School of Communication of the University of Miami. I feel blessed that they’ve always been immensely supportive (and extremely patient!) with every project I decide to pursue and fund.

Here’s what to expect next week:

• The OVA will launch with at least seven courses. This includes mine, around 5 hours about the basics of information design and data visualization; if you know me, you’ve probably heard me say that I don’t teach how to design visualizations, but how I design visualizations. My OVA course is true to that idiosyncratic spirit.

• After the official launch, we’ll keep releasing new courses at the end of every month until June. We’ll make a pause around July and August, then resume in September with more offerings I’m negotiating these days.

• In previous newsletters, I mentioned that the OVA will also include a yearly MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that I’ll lead myself. That’s still happening. It’ll begin around the end of April. I’ll send you more updates about it in the next month or so.

It’s been a busy and stressful year, but it’s been worth it, as nothing I’ve done before —my four books, public talks, the popular MOOCs in the early-to-mid 2010’s— compares in scope and ambition to the Open Visualization Academy. I believe that it’ll have an immense positive impact on a new generation of data communicators and designers. At least, that’s my hope.

That’s all for today. Save the date, and please help us spread the word among friends and colleagues!