Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Dynamic educational data award

by Cassandra Davis and Lynda Hawe
Communications Coordinators, Directorate for Education

Spreading and sharing information is crucial. Doing so in an engaging and simple way is extremely powerful. Technological advances combined with creative new data visualisation tools allow complex data to be understood by everyone, even on a quick glance.  What a great skill it is to be able to identify trends and patterns in the data and then present them in a manner that is both accurate and an exciting watch!

Last September, at the launch of annual OECD Education at a Glance, we opened a competition challenge in collaboration with This required graphic designers to wrap their brains around a complex data set, in order to construct a clear and compelling visualisation, on the economic costs and returns on education.

The winners were Krisztina Szucs and Mate Cziner from Hungary. They were chosen for successfully breaking down the complex interplay between costs and returns into a form that is easy to evaluate. Their interactive chart does an amazing job in condensing highly complex data on the costs and benefits of education around the world. It clearly highlights important facts showing students, parents and policy makers where the real costs and benefits lie for them in relation to education in a very dynamic visualisation.  It takes a detailed look at public versus private costs, per men and women for three simultaneously selected countries, while reflecting the benefit comparison between upper-secondary and tertiary education.

As the old proverb goes “a picture paints a thousand words”, and this still very much holds true today. Szucs and Cziner are congratulated for their striking visual design, we invite you to explore it.

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