I was inspired by this article, which tells the story of Andrew Ng‘s father Ronald, with respect to online self-tuition. Well, Ronald, now almost 74, has successfully completed 146 online courses since 2012.

Even before reading the article, I asked myself: How many online courses have I completed since May 2015, the point in time when I took the decision of starting this blog, to learn about Data Science… and more, sometimes they were out of curiosity, sometimes because I needed to dive in some subjects that could help me in the work I was doing or going to do. So, I said to myself: What a good idea would be to make a quick count! And I will only count those for which I have completed, at the time of taking the course, 100% of the lessons (or obtained a certificate).

First, it must be said that not all the courses are still available. So, for some of them I can only count them if I remember them or if I find a certificate (that I almost always download). However, I must say that I have stopped linking them on LinkedIn, after a certain initial moment of excitement I think it becomes tedious, even silly at times. In this process, I also discovered a few issues with the various platforms. Coursera individual certificates of the Data Science Specialization are no longer available when clicked, they are available from the specialization page, another certificate (Data Visualization tells me that I have passed with 10000.00 % – Thanks!) I will also list courses not related to Data Science.

So, let us start with Coursera:

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
1	Text Retrieval and Search Engines/ChengXiang Zhai	9 May 2015	N
2	Text Mining and Analytics/ChengXiang Zhai	17 July 2015	N
3	The Data Scientist’s Toolbox/Jeff Leek	7 August 2015	Y
4	Getting and Cleaning Data/Roger Peng and others	30 November 2015	Y
5	Exploratory Data Analysis/Roger Peng and others	11 January 2016	Y
6	Reproducible Research/Roger Peng and others	22 January 2016	Y
7	Statistical Inference/Roger Peng and others	1 March 2016	Y
8	Regression Models/Roger Peng and others	6 April 2016	Y
9	Practical Machine Learning/Roger Peng and others	2 May 2016	Y
10	R Programming/Roger Peng and others	6 October 2015	Y
11	Developing Data Products/Roger Peng and others	4 June 2016	Y
12	Data Science Capstone	3 January 2017	Y
13	Introduction to Recommender Systems/Joseph A. Konstan	10 October 2015	Y
14	Data Visualization/John C. Hart	24 October 2015	Y
15	Machine Learning/Andrew Ng	9 August 2017	Y
16	Introduction to Data Science in Python/Christopher Brooks	19 February 2017	Y

Wow, that is a long list! I have then discovered Udemy, and also that some courses offered there are free of charge. I have started some small exchanges with teachers there. But I also have to say, that albeit some courses are outstanding (I would like to mention Chad Darby as an excellence in this department) the quality of the tuition varies wildly if you compare them with Coursera.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
17	Polynomial Regression, R, and ggplot/Charles Redmond	25 August 2015	Y
18	R, ggplot and Simple Linear Regression/Charles Redmond	24 August 2015	Y
19	Master Java web Services and RESTful API with Spring Boot/Ranga Karanam	18 September 2020	Y
20	Spring and Hibernate for Beginners	16 October 2018	Y
21	Basics of Scrum, Agile and Project Delivery	February 2020	N
22	Training Sets, Test Sets, R and ggplot	27 August 2015	Y

After that, I took a look at Edx. A course inspired me here, and I also wrote an article on it: The Analytics Edge.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
23	The Analytics Edge/Various	23 May 2019	Y

There are some platforms that are no longer available. For example the Stanford’ university Lagunita offered a number of courses, most if not all of which were totally free of charge. These courses are now hosted on Edx, as described here. Stanford continues to offer some free of charge courses.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
24	SQL/Jennifer Widom	13 February 2020	Y
25	Statistical Learning/ Hastie & Tibshirani	22 October 2017	Y

A little bit later, I found out about cognitiveclass.ai, a site massively centred around IBM and their very interesting free offer. Some of the courses are also offered (in slightly different versions) on Coursera. These are introductory courses, such that if you know something about the subjects you are really quickly done. I just used them to apply in Python what I already knew from R. The site also offer badges for courses/track completion and these obtained badges can be shared on acclaim.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
26	Machine Learning with Python	27 September 2018	Y
27	Data Visualization with Python	19 September 2018	Y
28	Data Analysis with Python	16 September 2018	Y
29	Python 101 for Data Science	12 September 2018	Y
30	Introduction to Data Science	17 September 2018	Y

In the meantime, as it shows from some of the courses already listed I discovered that MOOCs can help when you feel there is something “else” about which you would like to expand your knowledge, not necessarily in the domain of Data Science. Therefore I discovered openclassroom.com, which offers courses also in other languages.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
31	Construisez des Microservices/Soufiane Amar	6/2019	N

I was interested in Django at one time, and Microsoft offered a free introductory course. This course is unfortunately no longer available.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
32	Developing Websites Using Python and Django	14 May 2017	Y

Google academy offered a course on Google Analytics. I thought it may be interesting. The certificate obtained have an expiry date, and for this it was 1 year after the obtention

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
33	Google Analytics for Beginners	1 April 2017	Y

CISCO has a networking academy. They offer a tool that is capable of simulating computer networks and network devices, and to program them to achieve a desired configuration.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
34	Packet Tracer 101	18 September 2016	Y

Cybrary as also a series of courses on various subjects.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
35	Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA)/Junaid Memon	30/10/2016	N

A French platform, offering completely free of charge training is available for French speakers. it is the FUN platform.

#		Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
36		Java EE Spring prêt à l’emploi/Seinturier-Dufrêne	21 January 2019	Y
37		Protection des données personnelles: le nouveau droit/Guillaume Desgens-Pasanau	12 July 2019	Y
38		Introduction à la statistique avec R/Bruno Falissard	29 October 2019	Y
39		Bioinformatique : algorithmes et génomes/Rechenmann-Parmentelat	13 October 2020	Y
40		Python 3 : des fondamentaux aux concepts avancés du langage/Legout-Parmentelat	9 September 2020	Y

I never liked the idea of the Nanodegrees proposed by Udacity, but they offer quality courses and some of them can be taken free of charge.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
41	Intro to Descriptive Statistics	2017	N

Also in French, Ionisx offers some good courses.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
42	Python Pour Les Scientifiques	2015	Y
43	Dans les Coulisses du Big Data	2015	N

I have also completed some little courses on Datacamp.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
44	Having fun with googleVis	16 May 2016	Y

I also like to follow and get certificates with Sololearn. These are by no means proof of knowledge. For me they are “refreshers” that let me keep alive some skills (as well as some of the others in this list). And I like to take them for fun sometimes, rather than playing a video game. Their competitions are interesting and there are many platforms that propose similar challenges, like Kaggle or Leetcode. However, I am not often challenged in that way. I prefer to create my own challenges instead.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
45	C	13 January 2019	Y
46	Python 3	7 January 2019	Y
47	Java	8 January 2019	Y
48	PHP	18 August 2020	Y
49	SQL	16 January 2019	Y
50	Jquery	2 February 2019	Y
51	Javascript	20 January 2019	Y
52	HTML	16 January 2019	Y

On Simplivlearning, I had a go at some of their programming courses.

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
53	Spring Boot Microservices with JPA/Alessandro Argentieri	2019	N

I should also mention the courses delivered by emails, one instalment per week or per day. I took one of these about blogging, courtesy of simpleprogrammer.com,

#	Course/Instructor	Date Completed	Certificate Y/N
54	Building a blog site/John Sonmez	2015	N

What else to say, I am not yet up to the same level of Andrew’s father. But I am on a good path! Furthermore, I have surely forgotten one or two courses on the way and I have at least 20 other courses on which I have enrolled and I did not complete on various platforms! Learning is a life-long experience, and on your path to learn new things you will always discover that there are many others that you do not know… …enjoy learning and thanks again Andrew!