Another MOOC/Learning platform has interesting offerings for Data Science. This is Udacity, with their Data Analyst Nanodegree program. The courses are not free and the cost of the program seems to be higher than those proposed by Coursera, and are based on a monthly fee. However some of the preparation courses that are part of the Nanodegree have versions that can be taken free of charge, and they propose some coverage that can be useful in many circumstances or even as a refresher, often given in a clear and fresh way. Another difference is that the Udacity Nanodegree is centred around “Projects”. The only purpose of the courses is to prepare for a certain number of projects. This is extremely interesting to get one’s hands “dirty” and unite the theory, which is anyway necessary with the practice. I find that this idea is intriguing and that it deserves to be looked at. The fact that many of the preparation courses are built with embedded quizzes after every concept is explained also helps fixing the concepts in memory. These are some of the “full version” preparation courses that are used in the Udacity Nanodegree:
- Intro to Descriptive Statistics
- Intro to Inferential Statistics
- Intro to Data Science (non free)
- Data Wrangling with MongoDB
- Data Analysis with R
- Intro to Machine Learning
- Data Visualization
- A/B Testing – There is no version of this course available outside the Nanodegree.
