If they buy the hook, they’ll buy the story.
A narrative hook (or just hook) is a literary technique in the opening of a story that “hooks” the reader’s attention so that he or she will keep on reading. Authors take great pains to build an enticing hook. Shouldn’t we as data educators?
When teaching a data concept, the “hook” is likely to be the exercise’s context and scenario. You want to paint circumstances that are believable to your learners, or at least interesting. In particular, the dataset used can make or break whether your learner stays engaged with the material.
A note on random data
It’s common in teaching data to rely on randomly-generated data. I avoid this. The scenario remains tethered from reality. Learners don’t see when this data concept might actually be used, so they see no reason to learn it.
If I can’t find a suitable real-life dataset to demonstrate on, I will generate data but add patterns and attributes so that it closely resembles real data. Again, it takes work to hook learners into learning about data. Don’t rely on random data! Here are some alternatives.
Proprietary data from the business
Using real-life data from the business has the benefit of being immediately tangible and actionable to the learner. They don’t have to speculate when they might use a given concept.
It does a certain data culture, however, to make free and easy sharing of data possible. I’ve been in organizations that closely guided certain datasets, or where it took feats of strengths and agility just to merge the incredibly dirty data needed.
Public data from real life
Ideally, real business datasets can anchor your data “hooks.” If not, there are plenty of alternatives. In fact, some of my favorite datasets to teach with have nothing to do with business:
You’ll often hear in instructional design that adults need to learn in a context that is immediately useful to them. I’m not sure I agree; things can be interesting and engaging without being of much utility.
Data analysis seems like such a dry topic that it would have no value outside of work. But we’ve all been sucked into articles with titles like “The Top 10 Baby Names of 2008” or “The Top-Grossing Oscar Nominees.” This is data analysis!
This natural curiousity for data analysis is a great hook. Honest, data education can be some fun and games.
“Hooking” data education
Setting a “hook” is only the beginning of an engaging data education space. To learn more about how to do it, I encourage you to subscribe below for exclusive access to my data education resource library.
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