Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

Post by foobarchu » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

fma wrote: post #40

jamestimmins wrote: post #5

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

Because it sounds cool...I remember when I was applying for college (2001), nanotechnology and biomedical engineering was all the rage. Glad I stuck with electrical engineering.

Post by StashOfCode » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 7:56 PM UTC

bhl wrote: post #31

bartart wrote: post #26

People at Berkeley view this class as kind of a joke. The average grade is insanely high and the topics are covered in much less depth than just the normal intro cs or stats classes. https://www.berkeleytime.com/grades/?course1=7765-all-all

The instructors have explicitly said, if you have previous CS or Statistics knowledge, the class isn’t for you. This is for people who don’t know how to program and haven’t taken a statistics course yet.

Post by pc86 » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 12:19 PM UTC

frabbit wrote: post #152

There are at least two big turn-offs to this course at first blush: 1) they insist on using anaconda (effectively another package manager complicating the already layered interaction of system pip, virtualenv, virtualenvwrapper etc ). 2) they use Microsoft VisualStudioCode (so, inevitably a good deal of time in this course will be spent learning how to navigate a bloated IDE)

Post by Double_a_92 » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

sigi45 wrote: post #115

jamestimmins wrote: post #5

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

This is a general issue i have seen as well. We live in 2018 and there is no open source course for everything. Instead there are probably 10-30k universities who have similar courses and professors who give the same lecture every year. They get paid often enough by countries to create and do those courses. In germany most of our unversities are paid by all of us germans anyway. And what do you find online? Always th…

Post by fjsolwmv » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 3:56 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #156

amrx101 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL. As someone from third world where local currency is enormously devalued with respect to US$, I wonder why would anyone do this?

If you think that's bad look up Executive MBA programs. Corporations basically give a university a nearly six figure donation for their top executives to get a tax-free tuition benefit for a rubber-stamped MBA largely indistinguishable from a real MBA. I know the above probably sounds like sour grapes, I don't have an MBA or any graduate degree, I just think the whole Exec. MBA thing is a total scam against the compa…