Data Science Education gets personal

by Joseph B. Rickert It is difficult to imagine that there is anyone on the planet with an internet connection and a desire to learn something new who has not at least looked into taking a massive open online course (MOOC). Last Fall, in an 11/4/12 article, the New York Time declared the Year of the MOOC and quoted one of Coursera’s founders, Andrew Ng, of Stanford Machine Learning fame, as boasting that with over 1.7 million students “Coursera was growing faster than Facebook”. This year with both Udacity and Harvard and MIT backed edX offering interesting and challenging courses...