Hello and happy new year everyone,

for those, whose New Year’s resolutions are related to further training, I’d like to point out several free MOOCs and interactive online courses that you might find interesting:

• Coursera offers several interesting and well-developed courses and specializations, e.g.:
  • Specialization in data science (John Hopkins University): This course provides a nice overview of fundamental concepts and tools for data science, including version control with git and data analysis with R.
  • Specialization Python for everybody (University of Michigan): The title should be quite self-explanatory – this is a really nice introduction into programming with python.
  • Specialization in big data analysis (University of California, San Diego): This course deals with processing, analyzing and extracting meaningful information from large amounts of complex data. This course also provides an insight into big data basics like Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Pig & Spark.
• Codecademy offers excellent interactive courses, that cover the basics of many programming languages and concepts, including e.g. Python, Ruby, SQL, git, JavaScript, HMTL&CSS and PHP. An overview of the current courses can be found at www.codecademy.com/learn.
• DataCamp also offers interactive courses, with a strong focus on R and several powerful R packages, like ggplot2, ggvis, dplyr, and data.table. There are several free courses as well as premium courses, where you can only access the first chapter for free. In addition, they have a nice blog with interesting info about R (I really like their data.table cheatsheet)
• edX offers a wide variety on MOOCs about Data Analysis & Statistics, like for instance a series of courses about Data Analysis for Life Sciences. The edX-plattform was created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
• iversity offers various MOOCs in German and English. I completed the course Disasters and Ecosystems: Resilience in a Changing Climate, which was quite good.
• There is a short 4-week MOOC offered by ESRI, which deals with building geo-enabled apps on the ArcGIS Platform. The course runs from February 3 to March 2, 2016. Further information on MOOCs offered by ESRI can be found at www.esri.com/mooc.
• Finally, I’d like to mention Boundless’ PostGIS workshop, which is the best PostGIS tutorial I came across so far.

I’m sure that there are even more courses that might be helpful, but I guess that this is a solid overview of some of the best courses available by now.

If there are any important platforms I didn’t mention or if you want to share your experience, feel free to leave a comment.

Regards,
Matthias