The MOOC Specialization of our UC-wide Computational Social Science course has been voted among the BEST online courses of ALL TIMES

Some 35,000 learners singed up during its first year already:

University of California Computational Social Science Coursera Specialization 

UC-intern sign up here

All online lecture material is publicly available through the

Official Course Website (this is from its first offering in 2018)

Lecture Playlist (lecture videos only)

Digital technology has not only revolutionized society, but also the way we can study it. For one, studying the massive digital footprint behind left behind by human online interaction allows us to gain unprecedented insights into what society is and how it works. This includes its intricate social networks that had long been obscure. Computational power allows us to detect hidden patterns through analytical tools like machine learning and to natural language processing. Finally, computer simulations enable us to explore hypothetical situations that may not even exist in reality, but that we would like to exist: a better world.  Computational social science provides us with the tools to explore new scenarios in a way that is as intriguing as playing a video game, while at the same time grounding it into the empirical reality of the world around us. This course gives an introduction to some of the exciting possibilities of how to do research.

UCCSS (University of California Computational Social Science) is the first online course taught collectively by Professors from all 10 UC campuses (about UCCSS).

While no formal requisites are necessary to join this course, at the end you will web-scrape ‘Big Data’ from the web, execute a social network analysis (‘SNA’), find hidden patterns with machine learning (‘ML’) and natural language processing (‘NLP’), and create agent-based computer models (‘ABM’) to explore what might happen if we would change certain things in society.

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The course consists of 10 lessons. On average, each lesson consists of 1h 40min of online lectures.

Course Objectives. By the end of the course you will:

• gained a comprehensive understanding of prevalent modern social science research methods;
• critically thought through the complexities of many pressing social science challenges;
• collected hands-on experience with several computational research tools;
• prepared yourself to better navigate in a world where the most valuable companies, the largest democratic elections, and your immediate social network are run by computational social science.

What do students say about the course?

• “My overall impression of this was: I can’t wait to use this for other stuff!!“
• “I absolutely think that these tools could be used in my future jobs, or even as a personal reflection. If you scrape and analyze the comments/reactions that your business gets on Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, etc., what does their language use say about how they interact with your brand — or what your brand brings out in them?”
• “Wow, this is cool and fun stuff. Even though I may not pursue anything social-science related in the near future, it is still nice to learn and get to experience all of these tools that computational social science offers and benefits in all kinds of careers and fields of study.“
• “As an Environmental Policy Analysis and Planning major, I was fascinated to learn that there is a feasible way to simulate policy implementation and impact multiple times within a short span of time.“
• “Throughout the course, the content was challenging, but when it was finally applied to the labs at the end of each module, it was really rewarding to see everything play out. It was even more rewarding when it made sense too! … I’m really glad I took this course! It was definitely a challenge, but I’m glad I got to experience and learn about so many topics I never knew even existed.”
• “It was fun seeing the results of the code that I made, and I never thought that I would be doing something like this in my life. The results also showed me what the society would look like…. Social network analysis and web scraping could be the tools that I use in my future job as all the internship that I’m looking now all related to social media or digital media.”
• “My career aspiration is to be a digital marketing expert. These computational tools have enormous implications for the field.”
• “I really really loved that this class let me learn hands-on and gave me experience with tools that
  have real world application and combine STEM & social science. I think that a lot of these tools are
  useful far beyond homework activities.”
• “Best course I have taken. I wish more online courses structured like this would be offered.”