5 Free Online Big Data Courses

two computers conceptually connected symbolizing big data courses

Handling large amounts of data can be confusing. You don’t have to hire someone special to handle your big data when there are free online big data courses. Here are five free online training sessions for big data analytics to improve your skills through exercises and projects.

Hadoop Starter Kit

Hadoop is essential to Big Data, but learning this new technology can be incredibly overwhelming. This course on Udemy is designed to teach you everything you need to know about Hadoop, HDFS, MapReduce, and Big Data. On top of clear videos, the course gives enrolled students access to a multi-node Hadoop training cluster. Students can try out everything they learn right away without buying new hardware or paying money to another service. This big data course is comprised of fifteen lectures and takes 3 hours and 19 minutes to complete.

Big Data and Hadoop Essentials

For those that already have a general idea of Hadoop, Big Data and Hadoop Essentials can help you fully understand how large amounts of data impact your business. This big data course is only 43 minutes and takes you through big data problems using easy-to-use visuals. Additionally, it covers the difference between data science and data engineering. As you complete each section, you’ll have quizzes to test your knowledge and ensure that you’re learning the concepts.

Setup Big Data Development Environment

This is another course from Udemy that helps you understand big data development. These big data course is for both Mac and Windows but does require a personal computer with a minimum of a 64-bit operating system and 16GB RAM. Rather than focusing on basic programming skills, this class provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up a development environment on your computer or laptop. This big data course has 37 total lectures that total over five hours.

Analyzing Big Data with Microsoft R Server

Analyzing Big Data with Microsoft R Server is brought to you by edX. It’s self-paced and completely free so that you can learn one of the most powerful programming languages on your own time. With this big data course, you’ll learn the programming language R and the main component of Microsoft R Server, the RevoScaleR package. By the end of this four-week course, you’ll know how to use MRS to run an analysis on a large scale dataset. You’ll also know how to deploy it on a Spark cluster or SQL Server database.

Probability & Statistics

Many colleges offer a selection of courses online for free, and this course is just one great example. Carnegie Mellon University offers a probability and statistics course that teaches students the basic concepts of statistical reasoning. The course provides text, simulations, case studies, tests, and more. You will need your own copy of Microsoft Excel, Minitab (the open source R Software), TI calculator, or StatCrunch, however. Keep in mind that this course may be longer than the others on this list since it is equivalent to one semester of a college statistics course.

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