Open Case Studies

What is the Open Case Studies (OCS) project?

The Open Case Studies project is an educational resource of experiential guides that demonstrate how to effectively derive knowledge from data in real-world challenges.

Browse case studies

Our case studies can be used:

by educators to help them teach
by students to help them with their classes
by independent learners to help them learn

Find out more about how others are using case studies and what they think of them in this study.

Learn more about the OCS project and how to use our case studies using our guide:
Website version | PDF version and more

Our case studies cover many concepts!
Statistical topics: from correlation to the influence of multicollinearity on linear regression
Data science topics: from making simple plots to building dashboards and performing machine learning (ML), a type of artificial intelligence (AI)!

What problem are we addressing?

Despite unprecedented and growing interest in data science on campuses, there are few courses and course materials that provide meaningful opportunity for students to learn about real-world challenges. Most courses frequently fail to frame the lectures around a real-world application and provide unrealistically clean datasets that fit the assumptions of the methods in an unrealistic way. The result is that students are left unable to effectively analyze data and solve real-world challenges outside of the classroom.

Problems with previously suggested solutions

In 1999, Nolan and Speed argued the solution was to teach courses through in-depth case studies derived from interesting problems, with nontrivial solutions that leave room for different analyses. This innovative framework teaches the student to make important connections between the scientific question, data and statistical concepts that only come from hands-on experience analyzing data. However, these case studies based on realistic challenges, not toy examples, are scarce.

What are we proposing as a solution?

To address this, we are developing the Open Case Studies educational resource of case studies, which demonstrate illustrative data analyses that can be used in the classroom to teach students how to effectively derive knowledge from data. This approach has successfully been used to teach data science courses at many universities, including: