My QGIS YouTube channel

A short post today about the QGIS YouTube channel I just launched: called Map Academy. I have my Udemy courses online, and these are aimed at people who want a fully-fledged end-to-end QGIS course at intro or intermediate level. The Udemy courses are going pretty well and I have more than 6,000 students in 148 countries so far - with the top countries being the US, India, the UK, Germany, Canada, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt and Brazil. If you want to request a video on my new YouTube channel you can do that using the form below.

But I also wanted to put together some material for when people just want to know one thing, often when they're stuck. So that's what the channel is all about, as explained in the intro video.

I've posted loads of tutorials on this blog in the past, as well as on Twitter but for a few years I've wanted to put together a channel like this to help people when they're stuck, or when they just want to learn new tricks and techniques quickly, without having to watch a long video, long intro or being asked to like and subscribe.

At the time of writing there are almost 100 videos on there and I'm going to keep adding to the channel. You can just browse manually, check out the Playlists (below) or just use the channel search function.

Short and to the point

Search for what you need.

I am also going to add, from time-to-time, longer tutorial videos, like this one on how to animate your Strava data. Maybe I'll even do the odd livestream, who knows?

Got a suggestion for a video? Use the form at the top of the page. Or, feel free to get in touch with me via Twitter, LinkedIn, the contact form on my website or by emailing me directly if you know my address.

If you suggest a video and I can fit the content in to a couple of minutes then there's a good chance I'll add it to the channel.

Thanks for stopping by :)

Student, no money? Contact me for free Udemy course link :)

Why Numbers Matter - new videos

To kick off my blogging for 2017 I thought I'd share some content that has been produced by the Sheffield Methods Institute, where I work half of the time these days. First of all, we have about 15 videos from our 'Making Sense of Data in the Media' MOOC, then we have a series of bite-sized software screencasts (RStudio, Excel, QGIS), and we now have also begun a series of short animations as part of our 'Why Numbers Matter' project. That's what I want to show you here. First of all, here's the first in the series, and it's about a very famous newspaper misprint involving 30,000 pigs.

The idea behind this series is to show that getting our numbers right is very important. However, for the first one, we decided to use a less serious example, in part because we thoguht it would make a good animation - and I wanted to see 30,000 pigs floating down a river. The videos are beautifully produced in my opinion - that's what happens when you hire a pro - though I have to say the voiceover guy needs some more coaching (me). Here's the original newspaper story and then the correction.

The bigger picture here is that I'm the Director of the Sheffield Q-Step Centre, which is part of a UK-wide initiative to help improve the quantitative skills of social science students, and I wanted to produce some content that would provide a more friendly intro to stats and quants. We have four more videos ready to go and will be releasing these on a weekly basis at first. We have one on averages, another on multi-level modelling, another on how maps can lie and one more on why chocolate doesn't make you fat...

However, we also recognise that numbers aren't always important. Sometimes, even though we know the numbers and the facts, we do seemingly irrational things anyway. So look out for a couple of 'Why Numbers Don't Matter' videos as well in the future.

We'd love it if people share this content widely and use it in their teaching - that's exactly what it's for.