Nice try, but I've always been suspicious of "Certificates" even at top tier schools. The best way to signal skills to potential employers is to gain experience (either through employers or maybe through contributing to some online collective endeavor).
As an employer I wouldn't want to pay people to go to school I pay them for results. Show me.
I do like the fact that elite schools are offering online certificates, but for $10K there has got to be a great value proposition.
I find the hard GPA requirement a little odd. So an MIT engineering alum with a 3.4 GPA wouldn't be accepted, but a liberal arts grad from a third tier school who happened to pass one probability and one linear algebra course, would be accepted?
> I do like the fact that elite schools are offering online certificates, but for $10K there has got to be a great value proposition.
The value proposition is that you have someone else pay for them. This is something that you can have most employers pay for as a continuing education proposition. It's the same way I got my MS without paying a dime.
Your approach (result-driven hiring) work well in small organization. In big organization certificates simplifies and standardize hiring process.
I am not saying I support it, I am just saying this is being used and if student aims to work for big company, he probably better invest into this piece of paper.
In big organization certificates simplifies and standardize hiring process
I agree 100%.
But let’s not forget that simplification and standardization are orthogonal to Results as measured by performance. The trouble is, simplification and standardization are how HR departments are measured, whereas employee performance is how line managers are measured. Thus, the companies most likely to emphasize these metrics will be the ones with HR departments.
It’s not so much that big companies benefit, it’s that HR departments benefit and big companies are the ones with HR departments.
SCPD is generally aimed at people with training budget money to spend that need some kind of certificate to show for it. There are a few more (Stanford Advanced Project Management some in financial engineering and risk management, some in bio engineering, IIRC).
The OpenCourseWare classes, which have a lot of spiritual overlap and more delivery system lap with SCPD, are aimed at everyone else.
Oh, the SCPD GPA requirement is not particularly strict, it seems, if you have a professional background in the area or a degree from ``top tier'' school or such. They just don't want to let anyone in who will reflect particularly poorly. (Which you might argue the corporate orientation defeats, but that's a different argument entirely.)
In Florida, in their state university system, a "certificate" is the replacement for a "minor". This isn't a total replacement, as one can get one's "certificate" issued separately from the diploma (I did this).
having taken the 224W, 229, and 246 courses, I will say that they provide a good introduction to a lot of the data mining algorithms (with 224w emphasizing graph-based algorithms, 246 emphasizing things like decision trees and association rules, and 229 emphasizing regression and SVMs).
however, the main issue for me is bridging the gap between completing those courses and actually being able to apply the skills learned to real-world problems. i hoped to do that with my internship this past summer, but it proved to be more difficult than i thought, particularly without having much guidance from anyone with similar specializations.
how much value does a certificate like this signal then? i feel like there's not much it shows beyond commitment and a focused interest, since it seems to me that the true test of anyone in data mining comes in the form of projects, not classes.
Given a real world problem, algorithms or the mathematics behind it do not provide insight on their own. The only value knowledge of the algorithms provide is a general understanding of the ways in which you can approach a problem. If you can do the mathematics, you can look at how the way you structure your question influences the results you are seeing.
The process of exploratory data analysis is best done in (imho) the style of a Lakatos research programme.
- prepare and clean the data
- explore using many fast methods and charts, come up with some working hypotheses about the data that are important to your client
- select method(s) to test those hypotheses
- perform the analyses
- determine what your results mean in terms of your research goal.
- alter your list of working hypotheses
- repeat [possibly collecting more data]
Obviously the only hard part about this is step five. And unfortunately this is the step that isn't t really taught in my experience. A simple case: Let's say you had a linear regression and you ran it once with 2 variables, got some parameter estimates (a,b) , and ran it again with 3 parameters and got some more parameter estimates (a1,b1,c). If b != b1, what does this mean? If you are using a custom link function (e.g. cloglog or logit), how should you interpret this now? This is where having a deep understanding of the mathematics behind the techniques starts to pay off. And this is the simplest example of a basic regression.
So, being someone in the market to hire someone with Data Mining and AI skills, this: " i feel like there's not much it shows beyond commitment and a focused interes" is very valuable. Obviously there are other ways that may be cheaper, but this is not a bad way.
The other things I look for are evidence of raw smarts and a track record of accomplishment, CS fundamentals, and, of course, personality. (Also, prefer someone with a poor understanding of Football so that they don't upset me in the fantasy league.)
Note that this isn't necessarily just a certificate. You're able to earn normal academic graduate credits, and in many cases, you can transfer up to 18 credits from SCPD into a Stanford master's program. It also looks quite good on a grad school application.
It's interesting to see the school simultaneously make a big push for free educational content online while also expanding it's for-profit online reach.
Online education isn't any more free to provide than anything else. And not all courses will scale equally well either. For instance, would a data mining course include several thousand cpu hours per student?
One would hope they are working towards a sustainable model for efficiently allocating education services, and doing so will require reasonable fees for some courses.
Yes, you're right. I'm not criticizing their decision.
With the cost of a college education skyrocketing, and "open source" education in its infancy, the moves and adaptations of the big players are just interesting to watch, is all I meant.
I believe the next 10 years will birth new forms of socially-acceptable higher education, which is a pretty big deal, since the system we have to day is pretty ancient.
MIT, with it's strict "information should be free" policy. Stanford, with a mixed bag approach. Harvard, with it's extension school. Johns Hopkins, with it's satellite campuses in other countries.. The big schools are all trying out different strategies to offer a variety of bundles for students looking for education.
Actually, I don't see this as out of line or inconsistent at all. Providing free education classes, particularly the introduction levels, increases awareness, acclimatizes students to learning online, and they learn how to do it. (They being Stanford. They work out hiccups over servers, videos, tests, whatever in the free courses.)
If Stanford then offered the next level of AI class online, but charged $1K? $3K for it, they'd get all their money back. Could turn into a classic Freemium model.
On the upside, this would probably be better for students as a whole, because most of them have no idea what they're really interested in. The ability to take all the intro classes for free and then pay for the ones that are more interesting to them is pretty interesting, from a macro-societal point of view.
The reason for this is that the parts of "Stanford" (an organization comprising tens of thousands of people) involved in each push are basically unrelated.
The paid-certificate program is run by the Stanford Center for Professional Development ("SCPD"), and is a trimmed down version of the online masters program. Costs here are high because courses are usually paid for by an employer investing in employee training; the SCPD program (like masters programs in general) is a profit center.
The db-class, ml-class, ai-class websites (and their video-only equivalents through openclassroom and classx) are being run by the professors who teach the classes, and the goal is education.
There isn't a "Stanford" policy on how online instruction should operate; just different members of a single club working independently.
Stanford has a lot of free courses too (Eg: this one about databases: http://www.db-class.org/course/auth/welcome ) and I think if one really wants to learn for the sake of learning and enrichment rather than having an official Stanford cert than these classes are good enough and you would not have to spend a fortune.
There's quite a substantial difference between ml-class.com and the equivalent CS 229 (Machine Learning). The former is much dumbed down, but still informative.
Thanks! The only links I had seen to the full CS 229 lectures to date were from a previous instance, and they were incomplete.
So far I've enjoyed CS 229A (ml-class.com) even if it has glided over a fair bit of the math, but I do want to spend time drilling down into the foundations more to make sure I know exactly why it all works the way it does and what kind of inference is valid to take from the results.
so, is ml-class.com then more comparable to the CS 229A class that is being offered this year? I'm taking the latter, and was wondering how similar the two are.
To clear up what this is, looking at the actual program description, it's not a class or a single course. It's an entire graduate program that takes 1-3 years to complete and the total tuition for the entire program is $9900-$11700.
It's not an entire graduate program. Instead you'll usually see this called a post-graduate certificate program. It's a series of class that area all in the same specific area (in this case 3) that at the end you'll have a signed piece of paper from Stanford that says you took these classes and passed.
Please note that I did not say it was a graduate degree, I said it was a graduate program, which is what it is.
It is not a single class, it is a set of classes, with a core class, and a set of electives. A graduate program and a graduate degree are not the same thing. This is a graduate program.
Typically there are 3 tiers of graduate program by coursework (certificate, diploma, masters) and 2 tiers of graduate program by research (masters, Ph.D). Universities may offer none or all of these programs under different names.
There is sometimes another tier by coursework called a "diploma for graduates" which differs from a graduate diploma in that it is usually at the undergraduate level, and very occasionally you see a Ph.D by coursework.
Stanford also offers professional certificates through SCPD which are entirely distinct from their graduate program being targeted towards the continuing education market.
As an employer I wouldn't want to pay people to go to school I pay them for results. Show me.
I do like the fact that elite schools are offering online certificates, but for $10K there has got to be a great value proposition.
I find the hard GPA requirement a little odd. So an MIT engineering alum with a 3.4 GPA wouldn't be accepted, but a liberal arts grad from a third tier school who happened to pass one probability and one linear algebra course, would be accepted?