Introducing the NEW Data Literacy Learning Academy

Ben Jones: Hi everyone, how you doing? Ben Jones here with the Powered by Data Podcast. This is episode five. Well, I hope you've been having a wonderful summer. It's coming to an end here pretty soon, isn't it? Well, we've been really busy this summer, so I missed a month or so with the podcast, but we're back. And what I want to talk about in the next couple episodes is some projects we've been working on recently. So I've been hard at work kind of rebuilding the entire site, and that's what I'll start with here.

So, you know, up until now, ever since 2018, we have been using a WordPress site on WP Engine. And, you know, we loved it. I mean, it was great. We built a learning management system out of it, and I'm real thankful for all the people that were helpful all along the way in building that site and making it what it is. But we decided recently that it was a good time for us to revisit that site and relaunch it.

And so we've retired the old WordPress site, and we've replaced it with this Next.js Tailwind site that we've built using Claude Code — not just a website, but also a learning management system, an ability for our learners to dive in and take our on-demand courses. And so that's what we've got, and we launched this about a week or so ago. I'm really proud of it. It was a great learning experience for me, you know, being in the saddle building this month after month.

It wasn't a one-weekend job like you'll hear some people talk about. No, not at all. We spent really months building it, and it's really taught us a lot about how to make a great web application for learning. So I want to give you a quick tour of it. So you've got kind of the home page here, and, you know, what's special about it? Well, first of all, if you go into the dashboard, you can see all your badges.

Now, if you had an account on our old site, no problem. All you have to do is make a new account, because the passwords don't carry over. Once you do that, all your learning progress will drop right in, including badges, how many lessons you completed, all of your quiz scores and everything. So, you know, upon creation of the account using the same email address, it will pull it all through. So that's nice.

But also, what we did is, you know, we updated all these courses. So, I mean, the fact of the matter is this topic matter is changing very fast. You know, so the AI Literacy Fundamentals course, for example — that came out along with the book AI Literacy Fundamentals not too long ago, a couple of years ago. But well, that's ancient history in tech world, right? So we've gone through and updated every one of these courses to just make them fresh, build them into, you know, a more updated version of each of the courses.

And so, you know, that seems to me to be an obvious first step — is to now create like a quarterly cadence of refresh and update, so that our learners get kind of the latest and greatest. No more referring to old versions of LLM foundational models or what have you. You know, we'll be telling them what is going on now, as opposed to a year or two or three ago. So that's pretty cool.

You know, also I think the thing that is kind of the game changer here, really, is that every one of these courses now, for people that get the kind of account associated with it, has a few AI-empowered features. So, for example, you can pull up a little explanation of each of these terms just by highlighting it and pulling up a definition or a description that way.

There's an AI tutor over here on the right. And these are all in beta, you know, because we want to try them out and learn ourselves about how these AI features affect the learning experience. It's not all sunshine and roses. I mean, there are some things about incorporating AI into the learning process that we don't really understand yet — how to do that well. So we're committed to learning along the way.

But for now, what these AI features will do — the AI tutor, for example — is it can give you some ways of interacting. The AI tutor is referencing the content that is here on the page, you know, so kind of the context being the lesson itself. And so that's one way that those who subscribe to this platform can interact with AI as it relates to all of our content.

Now, in order to do this, of course, we've had to vectorize all of our books, all of our courses, create them in an embedded format that the foundational AI model can reference using RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation. This is basically saying, hey, when I ask you a question, you, the AI, are going to go reference and pull up any relevant information that you can find related to this topic — okay — in the body of knowledge that we're giving it access to, namely all of our books and courses.

There's also an AI coach in there. So, you know, you can kind of create a profile, okay. That profile, like, you know: what's your industry, what's your level of comfort, what are your goals, et cetera. So you sort of tell the site a bit about who you are and what you're interested in. And then there's an AI coach that has access to that profile, also has access through vectorized embeddings to all of our content. And so the idea is that this coach can help you figure out a way to navigate through these courses in a way that allows you to really personalize that learning.

All right. So then one other thing here is that, for the first time ever, we have a wide-open free course. So all you need is an account. You don't have to pay for anything to access what we call 21 Key Traits of Data Literacy.

And this is a self-assessment along with a course. The idea is you can score yourself on various traits — knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors. And you rate yourself both in proficiency (how good am I at that trait today) and importance (how important is it for me to master that particular trait in my everyday life today).

And so once you get through all of those scorings, you know, really easily going through and checking all the statements that apply to you, saving those responses into your profile, it will then give you a learning roadmap. Okay, so then how do you then not just go through our courses, but a lot of other free resources that are out there as well? So that's pretty cool.

Now, what I love most about this new platform — it's really exciting for me, because, you know, moving to Next.js via building with Claude Code — just real briefly, you know, you've got kind of the GitHub repository of all the code, right? There's a Supabase backend that has essentially all of the data and the data tables. And we're running it on, you know, Vercel. So this allows us to set all of our environment variables and deploy and update and modify as we go along. So it's a really cool stack, right? Claude Code, GitHub, Vercel, and Supabase. This package is really amazing, and so I really recommend you kind of explore how you can build with that. There's so much you can do.

So, as a small example of something you can do, we've built this little SQL sandbox here that, you know, we're gonna work into some SQL courses, so that when you learn and take the course, you don't just read about it — you can actually try it. So, you know, you can actually just write your query right here in the browser.

You know, so if I've got kind of this blank slate to start with — and this is a course we were working on. So the story here, you know, is that we're working on a course for a client, and a lot of that involves these queries that the learners need to figure out and learn. And so I wanted to just cross-check all of the queries to make sure they were running perfectly before we shipped the course. And, you know, I thought to myself, well, okay, I can use SQLite and download it and whatnot. It's free.

But then I thought to myself, well, we've got this brand new site. I mean, maybe I can just incorporate it into the site. And sure enough, you know, SQLite does have a version you can incorporate directly into your website. And so that's what this is. So let's say I want to, for example, import, let's say, a transactions fact. This is from a fictitious company called Granite and Glade, which sells adventures into national parks and such. So I've got my little data table in here. Now, then so what I can do once I've got that is actually just go ahead and maybe put a query into here.

Let's try it out real quick. You know, maybe I just want to know, I don't know, how many transactions there are here with this company. And I can run that query. There it is. All right, so I've got three hundred and thirty-seven thousand. That was my answer in the lesson, by the way. So I can see, you know, it was correct, which is good. So before we ship it, we make sure that that all checks out.

We can do another one here. Let's try — well, there's a daily operations fact table. And let's maybe see, for example, how many different weather conditions we have, grouping them by weather condition. And we'll run. We can see they're mostly clear days, but also cloudy and rain and snow.

So, wow, you know, I was never able to do this with WordPress. I mean, I'm sure it's possible, but now this is sort of within reach for someone like me. So we're gonna incorporate this, as I said, into some courses that are coming soon.

So there you have it, right? So that's what we've been up to lately, why you haven't heard from me in a month or two, since we've been working hard to get this site out there and live. You know, if you wanted to check it out, you can. So I'll just show you how it works.

We actually dropped the price quite a bit in order to subscribe. So, you know, there's that free account — you get access to 21 Key Traits. If you go to the Plus account, you get access to all of our courses. But, you know, not everyone wants the AI features, and so we get that. And so we provide a tier where you can just get access to the courses. But of course, we do have that AI-empowered version as well.

And so, as has always been the case, if you'd like to have your team go through our training, then get a hold of us. We're actually doing some workshops coming up on a new course we're going to be launching soon called Enhancing Your Workflow with AI. And so if you want to schedule a live session to complement these on-demand courses, then please get in touch with us. You can just do so directly here on the site.

This is gonna be nice, because it'll replace — well, WP Engine, as great as they are, was very expensive. This will also allow us, since we have an entire backend here, basically a sales pipeline workflow incorporated into the admin features of the site — we'll be able to get rid of HubSpot.

So, you know, what I love about it, again, as a summary, is we get to really experiment and learn. We have just a whole world of opportunities to continue to explore new learning experiences for users of the site. And it's a huge cost saver. I mean, we're cutting out, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars a month by switching to this new platform.

You know, the WordPress plug-in world — it seems like they always hit you up with another plugin to do every little thing. And so, you know, before long and over the years, you know, that cost for that site just balloons. And so this will really allow us to save quite a bit on the operational side of the expenses for Data Literacy.

Well, that's all I have for now. So thanks for tuning in and listening. It's been an exciting year of experimentation and creating and building, and now launching. And so we've got more to come here.

Next session I wanna talk about an open-source package we created and launched earlier this summer for my book, Avoiding Data Pitfalls. So we found a way to give everyone a tool to allow them to cross-check their analysis and reference all of the different kinds of blunders that are defined in that book. And we'll talk about that in the next lesson.

But for now, feel free to kind of reply back and let me know what you think about the site, about our experiments, about the data literacy movement in general. It's never been more important to understand and speak the language of data and AI. And so, you know, that's what we're all about. So we're gonna keep doing that more and more. Appreciate all your inputs, your ideas, your thoughts and feedback. As always, very welcome.

Huge thanks to our clients who keep us going, who are the reason why we can afford to experiment and create like this. You know who you are, and I really appreciate everything that you've brought to the table for us — and hopefully you have benefited in return from working with us.

So, all right, everyone, you take care. Enjoy the last few weeks of summer here. Best of luck as the year progresses and into the end of the year. And yeah, wish you all the best. All right, talk to you soon. Bye now.