Coursera and MathWorks announce new data science course

MathWorks and Coursera have announced a joint effort to address the data science skills gap. MathWorks is developing a series of courses titled ‘Practical Data Science with MATLAB’, with the first course, ‘Exploratory Data Analysis with MATLAB’, now available on Coursera.

According to a March 2019 Coursera Global Skills Index (GSI) report, the demand for data science skills is increasing by both individuals and companies alike. Looking at year-over-year learner enrolment numbers within the domain of data science, there was a notable increase in demand for the competencies of machine learning (+14%) and statistical programming (+9%). The increasing amount of data being collected across industries has fuelled demand for greater personalisation in products and services, influencing the popularity of these skills.

The Practical Data Science with MATLAB specialisation helps address this demand as it is aimed at engineers, scientists and researchers who need to learn data science either as part of their job or to branch into new career opportunities. The series enables these domain experts to learn and apply data science without spending time building or honing software development skills. Each course takes approximately five weeks and, upon completion of the four-course specialisation, students will be ready to start applying MATLAB to common analysis tasks found in applications such as autonomous systems, voice recognition, predictive maintenance and medical imaging.

“The data science skills gap spans industries and countries. We’re excited to launch this new content featuring MATLAB, which has worldwide appeal given its use across disciplines in industry and academia,” said Dil Sidhu, Chief Content Officer at Coursera. “In this specialisation, learners will work with trusted MATLAB capabilities and use community-driven solutions from the large MATLAB user base, gaining skills they can use to do their jobs more efficiently and strengthen their careers.”

“Engineers, scientists and researchers are increasingly working on projects that demand data processing, feature engineering and machine learning to build and operationalise predictive models. They rely on learning platforms like Coursera to acquire and hone these data science skills,” said Seth DeLand, Technical Marketing Manager – Data Science, MathWorks. “Our new series of courses supports multiple types of learners, including those new to data science who want to learn and understand where to apply this in their work, as well as domain experts already involved in projects requiring data science who want a deeper understanding so they can begin immediately using data science on a project.”

Each course within the series forms a progressive bridge to building competencies to use MATLAB for data science:

• Course 1 — Exploratory Data Analysis with MATLAB
• Course 2 — Data Processing and Feature Engineering with MATLAB
• Course 3 — Predictive Modeling and Machine Learning with MATLAB
• Data Science Project: MATLAB for the Real World
   

More details on the Practical Data Science with MATLAB specialisation can be found at: coursera.org/specializations/practical-data-science-matlab.

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