Data 8X: Foundations of Data Science now on edX
You’ll learn to program when studying data science — but not for the purpose of building apps or games. Instead, we use programming to understand the world around us.
Professor John Denero
UC Berkeley and edX offer Data 8: Foundations of Data Science, available digitally as a three-part Foundations of Data Science Professional Certificate Program. After a successful pilot launch in Spring 2018, enrolling more than 75,000 students, the Data Science Undergraduate Studies is excited to offer Data 8X self-paced, meaning students can work through course material according to their own schedules.
The three online courses, listed sequentially under the Foundations of Data Science umbrella, follow closely along with Data 8. Because the principles of interpreting and modeling data apply broadly to a diverse array of industries, many students who choose to enroll come from a non-computer science background or career. Students in both the in-person and online offerings are provided with their own Jupyter notebook to start coding; no messy installations are necessary.
Data 8X covers everything from testing hypotheses, applying statistical inferences, visualizing distributions and drawing conclusions— all while coding in Python and using real-world data sets. One lesson might take economic data from different countries over the years to track global economic growth. The next might use a data set of cell samples to create a classification algorithm that can diagnose breast cancer. These real-world explorations into data science make advanced statistics and computer science concepts intuitive and applicable to everyone.
“You’ll learn to program when studying data science — but not for the purpose of building apps or games,” Professor John Denero said. “Instead, we use programming to understand the world around us.”
All of these are taught by Berkeley’s award-winning faculty, Ani Adhikari, John Denero, and David Wagner. Enjoy their video introduction to the program from Spring 2018.