Berkeley Offers Its Data Science Course Online For Free (berkeley.edu)

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.

Comments

It's not bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Data Engineering/Science are top careers today

[garcia]

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.

Re:Free?

[TuringTest]

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 is at the bottom.