Since recently announcing $16M in funding, Coursera has been making quite a bit of noise. Last fall, Stanford University decided to freely offer a couple computer science classes online. The response was huge, and that led to the creation of Coursera.

The courses are no longer limited to computer science, and Stanford is no longer the only school involved. Here is a list of academic areas being offered and another list with the schools involved.

Academic Areas

• Healthcare, Medicine, and Biology
• Economics, Finance, and Business
• Humanities and Social Sciences
• Mathematics and Statistics
• Computer Science
• Society, Networks, and Information

Universities Involved

• Princeton University
• University of Michigan
• University of Pennsylvania
• Stanford University

Although, not all of the courses will be directly related to data science, many of them are very close. Naturally Math, Statistics, and Computer Science areas have direct relations to data science. However, some of the other areas such as Networks, Biology, and Economics are some of the most popular application areas for data science. This is very exciting. My only concern is that the courses are a bit too much like traditional university courses with specific start/end dates and homework due dates. It will be interesting to see if the course structures change over time.

Anyhow, the following courses are starting today. Signup and start learning.

• Machine Learning – A major focus area of data science
• Computer Science 101 – probably a good starting point if you don’t know how to program
• Compilers – good for understanding how programming languages work
• Automata – hard to explain in 1 line, but it contains some fundamental principles in computer science
• Intro to Logic – learn to reason systematically
• Computer Vision – not sure of the relation to data science, but I am sure there is one, if you know, please leave a comment

Are you going to enroll in any of these courses?