Extra points
Ulysseus COIL · Collaborative Online International Learning
· provisional dates
In short
About this COIL
Students from three universities work together in international teams to compare socio-economic challenges across European countries. Each team chooses a question about the economy, society or public policy, analyses real data with the methods of the course (correlation, regression, classification, dimensionality reduction and clustering), builds a dashboard and presents the results to everybody in a joint online session.
The COIL is part of each university's own course: students receive ECTS and are graded by their home university.
Learning outcomes
What you get
Why join?
Certificate
Who we are
Teaching team
Who to contact
Write first to the teacher of your own university.
How we work with you
Eight weeks
Schedule
Eight weeks and three deliverables. Click on a week to see what to do and what to submit.
Three deliverables
Submit your work
Each deliverable is due on of its week. Use the button of the deliverable to upload your files.
How submission works
Templates
Two templates cover everything you submit: a Word file for deliverables 1 and 2 and your final reflection, and a PowerPoint file for your slides.
Online · 45 minutes
Joint sessions
Rules for the sessions
The four sessions
How it works
Student guide
Everything you need to work in the COIL, in nine short topics. Read it once before the kick-off and come back whenever you need it.
Download the guide as PDFThe guide, topic by topic
Quick answersFrequently asked questions
Can't find your answer?
Write to the teacher of your own university. Contacts are in Team.
Examples and results
Projects
Final team projects
Example projects
Six project ideas proposed by the teachers, all feasible with the COIL dataset, with their question, indicators and methods. Your team can choose one, adapt it, or propose its own question in deliverable 1.
The dataset
Data
Ready-to-use indicators for European countries (EU-27 and the Western Balkan candidates), , so that teams can spend their time analysing rather than searching for data. Spain, Slovakia and Montenegro are highlighted; the other countries give enough observations for regression and clustering. Last update: .
Download the data
- coil_indicators_long.csvone row per country, year and indicator (best for Python and R)
- coil_indicators_wide.csvone row per country and year (best for Power BI and Excel)
- coil_indicators_gretl.csvthe same table ready for Gretl (dots in the codes replaced by underscores)
- coverage.csvhow many years of data each country has for each indicator
Open it in your tool
No code needed
Power BI or Gretl
Power BI: Get data → Text/CSV and open coil_indicators_wide.csv. Gretl: File → Open data → User file and open coil_indicators_gretl.csv.
With code, optional
Python or R
Open coil_indicators_gretl.csv with pandas or read.csv. Ready-to-run scripts are in Resources.
Step by step
Methods module
Every method with a worked example on these data, menus first. Open the PDF
Explore the indicators
Data coverage for the three COIL countries
Years with data between . Gaps are shown as gaps: no value has been estimated or filled in.
Sources: World Bank Open Data (CC BY 4.0) and IMF DataMapper. Please cite the source of each indicator in your work.
Slides, code and templates
Resources
Useful links
Publishing your dashboard
Power BI Publish to web is often disabled in university accounts. If it is, submit a PDF export or screenshots of your dashboard, an interactive HTML file made with Python (Plotly) or R (plotly / Shiny), or the charts exported from Gretl (PNG or PDF) put together in one PDF. Any of these is fine.