MOOC

I am currently following a Coursera based IBM Professional Certificate on Data Analysis. Finished the first 7 courses and now busy with the Capstone Project. I’ve followed a couple of online courses over the years from various sites like DataCamp, Stanford, Udacity and so on. But it all started with an experiment in 2011 when Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig organised the first free MOOC on Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. By pure chance I was part of it. A little later Andrew Ng gave his course on machine learning which I also followed and there was another free one from Daphne Koller if memory serves me right. Not long after the first companies arose like Udacity and Coursera. Still free at the beginning and paying later on. Part of the courses are still free and only when you want full access or a certificate do you have to pay. I have used these platforms to get a good start on topics like Python, Matplotlib and pandas dataframes. Everything exists online in free documentation but I find that too hard to read. And the online platforms often come with good tips and tricks that you might miss otherwise. I guess it all depends but for me these online courses work well as an entry point and to get me going. Anything not covered I can then google. And for a comprehensive and systematic coverage there are still plenty of books to read. If you are interested in how the ‘first’ MOOC started you can find a brief overview here.