Online Courses

If you are a staff member or postgraduate student at UCT who would like to improve or update your data and programming skills with the goal of improving your ability to work with research data, there are several courses, workshops and learning communities which can help you achieve your goals.

Full-time courses and degree programmes

UCT offers several full-time for-credit courses which you may be able to sign up for during your postgraduate studies, and which can lead to a professional qualification. For more information, see the table below and consult the relevant UCT Faculty Handbooks for up to date information. Please note that many of these courses have prerequisites and require you to pay fees and be registered for a full degree or programme.

Short courses and learning communities

If you have already completed your studies, it may be more appropriate for you to sign up for a short course. It can also be extremely helpful to connect with a community of other researchers from your discipline or from cognate areas who are also developing their skills. These are some of the available options:

Data Ethics: The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) offers a short course on the Responsible Conduct of Research.

LinkedIn Learning: All UCT students have free access to any of the LinkedIn Learning video training courses. Although these materials are not developed with researchers in mind, they can assist you with a wide range of data science skills using materials which you can access in your own time.

Log in with your UCT account to access short courses offered via LinkedIn Learning. Some useful starting points might include the module on Python for Data Science Essential Training or R Essential Training - Wranging and visualising data.

The Carpentries: The Carpentries is a supportive cross-disciplinary community which teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide, and which has developed workshop curricula adapted to a wide range of uses, including Software Carpentry (to learn best practice in when developing research software), Library Carpentry (for people in library and information-related roles who need to work with code and data), and Data Carpentry (for researchers who want to learn to code and work more effectively and reproducibly with data).

Workshop curricula support a wide range of disciplines, including Astronomy, Ecology, Genomics, Image Processing, and Social Science. These workshop curriculum materials are available for free online but the organisation runs regular in-person and online workshops if you prefer hands-on training. Once you have completed the workshops you can continue to qualify as a certified Carpentries instructor and start running your own workshops using the free materials.

Many Carpentries workshops are specifically targeted at students in African countries and we’d encourage you to contact Angelique Trusler, Director of Community, to find out whether any upcoming workshops will be available to you as a UCT student or staff member. Details of upcoming Carpentries workshops are available on the website, as well as information about how to host your own Carpentries workshop at UCT.

Discipline-specific workshops and summer schools

CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science: The University of Pretoria hosts an annual online and self-paced course, the CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science, which is part of a global network, the CODATA-RDA Data Science schools. The school includes a Social Science stream for certain but not all topics. Look out for emails about this annual event, you’ll need to submit a short motivation to sign up for the course and there is also a small fee payable.

SADiLaR Escalator: The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) is a national centre which supports research and development in the domains of language technologies and language-related studies in the humanities and social sciences. SADiLaR Escalator runs various training activities throughout the year, by application. Again, look out for emails about these opportunities.

CHPC / NITheCS Coding Summer School: The Summer School is jointly organised by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the National Institute for Theoretical Computational Science (NITheCS). This is offered in hybrid format, on an annual basis in Jan/Feb.

NITheCS SATACS Courses are offered throughout the year, by application.

The Department of Science and Engineering Centre of Excellence in Mathematics and Statistical Sciences (CoE-MASS) focuses on advancing cross-disciplinary research topics and developing national capacity in the scarce fields of mathematical and statistical sciences. 

Digimethods Winter School: This annual winter school hosted by Rhodes University’s School of Journalism and Media Studies  is focused on developing digital methods and ethical awareness for  media, journalism and communication scholars.