MIT is offering an online big data course called “Tackling the Challenges of Big Data.” The course is designed for IT professionals, engineers, technical managers, and entrepreneurs who wish to familiarize themselves with the broad concepts of big data as well as the most recent developments in research.
The course runs from March 4 to April 1. For a mere $495, participants will “survey state-of-the-art topics in Big Data, looking at data collection (smartphones, sensors, the Web), data storage and processing (scalable relational databases, Hadoop, Spark, etc.), extracting structured data from unstructured data, systems issues (exploiting multicore, security), analytics (machine learning, data compression, efficient algorithms), visualization, and a range of applications,” according to the MIT website.
Faculty members from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the School of Engineering will teach the course. Participants who successfully complete the course will receive an MIT Professional Education certificate of completion.
The course is held over four weeks and will provide the following:
- Five modules covering 18 topic areas: with 20 hours of video
- Five assessments to reinforce key learning concepts of each module
- Case studies
- Discussion forums for participants to discuss thought provoking questions in medicine, social media, finance, and transportation posed by the MIT faculty teaching the course; share, engage, and ideate with other participants
- Community Wiki for sharing additional resources, suggested readings, and related links.
The course will be offered through MIT Professional Education, the arm of MIT that provides professional education and training for science, engineering, and technology professionals worldwide. It will be the first of a new line of professional programs called Online X Programs, to be delivered globally using the open-source online education platform edX. EdX is a massive open online course (MOOC) platform developed by MIT and Harvard to host online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience. EdX has nearly 1.6 million users.
To learn more, go to http://web.mit.edu/professional/onlinex-programs/courses/tackling_the_challenges_of_big_data.html.