The ongoing coronavirus outbreak is changing the way we know the industry, work, and life. Things are uncertain and the persistent lockdown period is taking a toll on our mental and psychological health.
However, adopting a different perspective, this quarantine can be viewed as an opportunity as well to pick up new skills, engage in personal development, or maybe participating in professional courses online.Big data, analytics, artificial intelligence - these things are getting more and more attention these days. And interestingly, there are nowadays plenty of reputed universities that offer course online at zero to no cost. Therefore, for people getting bored in the lockdown, here is a curated list of four online courses on Data Science.
Data Science Specialisation - Coursera
This course is being offered by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and the duration of this course is approximately eight months and six hours/week is suggested for that purpose. This series of courses is one of the most enrolled and highly valued sets in this list. JHU did an excellent job with the programme combining scope and depth. One aspect that's included in this series that is usually absent from many of the courses in data science is a full section on statistics that is the foundation of data science. For this course, some programming experience and a working knowledge of mathematics up to algebra-- neither calculus or linear algebra-- is recommended.
This course is free, but will require $49/month for certificate and graded materials. This course will explore these mentioned topics and by end of this course, the applicant is expected to develop useful insights on these -The Data Scientist's Toolbox, R Programming, Getting and Cleaning Data, Exploratory Data Analysis, Reproducible Research, Statistical Inference, Regression Models, Practical Machine Learning, Developing Data Products and Data Science Capstone.
Applied Data Science with Python Specialization - Coursera
This course is being offered by University of Michigan. The duration of course is approximately four months and eight hours/week is suggested for that purpose. The practical aspect of data science is the subject of this great specialisation. This means a good introduction to widely used Python data science libraries, such as matplotlib, nltk, pandas, networkx, and scikit-learn, how to use them on real data will be provided. This series does not provide the statistics required for data science or the derivations of different machine learning algorithms, but offers a detailed overview of how these algorithms can be used and evaluated in Python. Regardless of this, for someone who already knows R and/or is studying the statistical principles elsewhere, this specialisation would be very fitting.
The course is free, but will require $49/month for certificate and graded materials. This course will explore these mentioned topics and by end of this course, the applicant is expected to develop useful insights on these - Introduction to Data Science in Python, Applied Plotting, Charting and Data Representation in Python, Applied Machine Learning in Python, Applied Text Mining in Python and Applied Social Network Analysis in Python.
Data Science Foundations - IBM
This course is being offered by IBM. The duration of course is approximately 12 hours. This is relatively a small course. IBM itself is offering this free data science course through its online portal which currently consists of one course which introduces to data science from a practitioner's point of view, to courses which address topics such as data collection, preparation and modeling from basic concepts and methodologies to advanced algorithms across the life-cycle of data science. This also addresses how to use open source software to collect some practical information.
This course is completely free and will explore these mentioned topics and by end of this course, the applicant is expected to develop useful insights on Introduction to Data Science, Data Science Tools and Data Science Methodology.
Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science
This course is being offered by MIT OPENCOURSEWARE. The duration of this course is seven to eight weeks. This course contains all the material required for the beginners to understand. The standard of the course needs no verification since it is offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).This addresses all of the topics related to statistics and machine learning from scratch making it the perfect course for computer science department undergraduates. The course has a heavy focus on data science application of the Python programming.
The course is completely free. The course does not declare any elaborate curriculum but it is expected to cover topics related to statistics and machine learning with concentration on data science application of the Python programming and Goto language.
The writer is a third year student of BBA programme at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), University of Dhaka.
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