Berkeley Offers Its Data Science Course Online For Free (berkeley.edu) 33
In a news bulletin, University of California, Berkeley announces that its "Foundations of Data Science" course is "being offered free online this spring for the first time through the campus's online education hub, edX." From the report: The course -- Data 8X (Foundations of Data Science) -- covers everything from testing hypotheses, applying statistical inferences, visualizing distributions and drawing conclusions, all while coding in Python and using real-world data sets. One lesson might take economic data from different countries over the years to track global economic growth. The next might use a data set of cell samples to create a classification algorithm that can diagnose breast cancer. (Learn more from a video on the Berkeley data science website.) The online program is based on the Foundations of Data Science course that Berkeley launched on campus in 2015 and now has more than 1,000 students enrolling every semester. The Foundations of Data Science edX Professional Certificate program is a sequence of three five-week courses taught by three winners of Berkeley's top teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award: DeNero, statistics professor Ani Adhikari and computer science professor David Wagner. The first of the three parts has already started (9 a.m. on April 2), but enrollment will remain open after the course begins. Furthermore, anyone in the world can enroll for free but those who want to earn the certificate will need to pay.
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How dare they offer a stem course that ignores the social injustices of today.
Look at the example data sets, they're doing it subliminally, but yes, they're doing it, FTFA:
One lesson might take economic data from different countries over the years to track global economic growth. The next might use a data set of cell samples to create a classification algorithm that can diagnose breast cancer. (Learn more from a video on the Berkeley data science website.)
It's not bad (Score:3, Informative)
During spring break from my local college I started this EDX course. It's not bad, and it is free.
It consists of four courses. The first one is "Python in Data Science". I put about 20 hours into it and made it through week 3 of 10. I learned some Python basics, went into Numpy, then Pandas dataframes.
The expectations for programming skill and math skill were low.
Used Data Salesmen. (Score:1)
Nice thing is after this I can graduate and go working for either Facebook or Google.
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Yes, just speak to Evgeny ...uh...Smith in HR. He will give you employment package and summary of benefits.
Okay. Then what? (Score:2)
The course -- Data 8X (Foundations of Data Science) -- covers everything from testing hypotheses, applying statistical inferences, visualizing distributions and drawing conclusions, all while coding in Python and using real-world data sets.
Literally none of which will be useful here on /. :-)
Data Engineering/Science are top careers today (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in Data Engineering, leading teams of what used to be known as ETL Developers building analytics warehouses and datamarts to power and operationalize models built by data scientists.
While over the past two or three years, it was considered , 2018 is supposedly [forbes.com]the year of the Data Engineer [datanami.com].
These aren't new roles, by any means, they're simply coming out of the dark reaches of organizations and becoming an integral part of successful business. DE and DS resources are expected to make sense of non-sense and present those findings to wider audiences than even 3-5 years ago, including C-level executives.
The company I currently work for has a large number of numbers-focused resources which span the gambit and *ALL* of them could benefit from learning the basics of how to take the data they use to the next level without having to rely on DE/DS teams to get it to them.
Just like spreadsheets are consumed and used by all levels of an organization, in a few years, DE and DS tasks will likely see similar amounts of proliferation across job titles. Yes, this approach can be fraught with challenge; however, it would serve any one who is in a field where they're analyzing data in spreadsheets or otherwise collecting and understanding data to take at least a basic course and bring themselves out of Excel pivot/macro/VBA hell into something more manageable.
TL;DR - take the course and apply the learnings to your own stuff. Maybe you'll end up in one of the top careers in the country.
Re:Data Engineering/Science are top careers today (Score:5, Informative)
I added three people to my team in August. We will add at least one more this year. We've grown 700% in 3 years.
Our data science team had to hire a contractor because we couldn't find anyone who was what we were looking for in a FR hire.
I don't know where you live and work but here in Minneapolis, we have negative unemployment for jobs requiring a college degree.
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"Inner Voices"
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I moved my way up through the ranks over the last 15 years. While I understand the view of the majority of Slashdot about management, I try my very best to empathize with my team and work hand in hand with them.
Call me all the names you want but know semantics mean nothing; actions mean everything.
Free? (Score:1)
$357.30 != free
Re:Free? (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
"Anyone in the world can enroll for free; learners who want to earn the certificate will need to pay."
The free enrollment link [edx.org] is at the bottom.
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Umm, clicking the 'The course -- Data 8X [edx.org]' link takes me to a page with a call-to-action button 'Pursue the Program ($357.30 USD)'.
At least to me, it's not super clear - after ten seconds of looking, how to '...enroll for free.'
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The "Pursue the Program" course is for a subscription to 3 related courses.
If you navigate to the page for the course "Foundations of Data Science: Computational Thinking with Python", the "View course" button allows you to subscribe to the course with or without paying the $99 certificate for that course alone.
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Thanks :D
Well, for a little while (Score:2)
I wonder how long this will last before it suffers the same fate of this other attempt [slashdot.org] at Berkeley putting content online for free. If everyone forgot, Berkeley tried this and was stopped by advocates for the disabled who demanded that, according to the law, they make all the free material disabled-accessible. And the law doesn't have an exception when putting the material online is free but making it disabled-accessible costs money, so they had to remove the whole thing.
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The course is available through edX, which is the same way they said they'd continue to make content available in the very post you cited.
Comment (Score:2)
I hope they include closed captions so they don't get closed down.