Coursera Announces First MOOC-Based Master's Degree in Data Science - insideBIGDATA

"Coursera, a leading online education company known for massive open online courses (MOOCs), today announced a professional data science master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Home to one of the top five computer science graduate programs in the United States, the University of Illinois will open access to its world-class data science curriculum at a fraction of the cost of a traditional on-campus or online master’s degree through the Master of Computer Science in Data Science (MCS-DS) degree on Coursera. Data science has quickly become one of the most sought-after and highest-paid professions in the United States, yet few highly ranked master’s programs exist today that are developed specifically for training data scientists, and none offer the scale of an open online course platform. The MCS-DS degree taps a whole new demographic of potential data scientists who are unable to take a traditional education path by reimagining graduate-level education as a 'stackable' degree. Unlike other master’s degrees, students can test the waters of the MCS-DS degree with a shorter Specialization certificate program in data mining or cloud computing, earning a meaningful credential that can then fully transfer to the MCS-DS if they later decide that they want the full degree ..."