Internet – Page 27 – DECISION STATS

The rise of the global MOOCs ( Massively Open Online Course)

Threatening the monopoly of corrupted universities that cater to rising educational aspirations with mediocre , recycled courses, the MOOC revolution now breaks out of North America to reach global universities.Of course, Coursera leads and I liked the tight integration with Meetup.com –

May I suggest they look at codeacademy and build much more gamification than currently available in their own courses.

From-

http://blog.coursera.org/post/43625628117/29-new-schools-92-new-courses-5-languages-4

Today we’re welcoming 29 new universities to the Coursera community of 2.7 million students and 33 existing universities across 4 continents!

also see

http://viz.coursera.org/2013-02-20-globe/

and

https://www.edx.org/press/edx-expands-internationally

To date, edX has more than 700,000 individuals on its platform, who account for more than 900,000 course enrollments.

EdX, the not-for-profit online learning enterprise founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), announced today the international expansion of its X University Consortium with the addition of six new global higher education institutions. The Australian National University (ANU), Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, McGill University and the University of Toronto in Canada, and Rice University in the United States are joining the Consortium

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Do you want a 100,000 extra analysts in your platform or language. Why don’t you let your training department design a MOOC for these platforms. Because the more people that are trained in your software or platform, the more brand ambassadors you have to selling it to future clients. Companies like 10gen are already doing it for MongoDB. And Oracle is doing it for R Enterprise ( see https://decisionstats.com/2012/10/23/10gen-and-online-education-mongodb/)

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What is a MOOC?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aiming at large-scale participation and open access via the web. MOOCs are a recent development in distance education using open educational resources. They are similar to college courses, but typically do not offer academic credit. Other forms of assessment or certification may be available including those based on learning analytics for online environments.

MOOCs originated within the open educational resources (OER) movement and connectivist roots. Several MOOC-type projects have emerged independently, such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX.^[1] Others, like Canvas Network and CourseSites by Blackboard Inc have evolved from learning management systems.

Also see-

http://www.mooc-list.com/ list of Massive Open Online Courses (free online courses) offered by the best universities and entities.

Download all your tweets

Now that the Government of the United States of America has the legal power to request your information without a warrant (The Chinese love this!)

Anyways- you can also download your own twitter data. Liberate your data.

Have you looked at your own data? Go there at https://twitter.com/settings/account and review the changes.

SAS Thought Leader declares war on data scientists on Valentine Eve

It all started because of the Google Guy, Hal Varian

Feb 25, 2009 – I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. … Hal Varian, The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2009. …

Then these guys ( Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil) made us sexy -that too in the Harvard Business Review.

Jill Dyche* is a thought leader. That’s what her job says. that too at SAS which took over her start-up Baseline Consulting. (* In addition to this, she writes forewords for struggling poets here )

She says here–

If the importance of data scientists is growing with the advent of big data, the sooner we understand what exactly it is they do, the better.

That is fair enough. But to add grievous injury to data scientists, She adds

(For fun I wrote a blog post on being a data scientist’s girlfriend.)

Actually the blog post was-Why I Wouldn’t Have Sex with a Data Scientist

But there’s no use. The data scientist is preoccupied. Preoccupied with finding, accessing, analyzing, validating, cleansing, integrating, provisioning, modeling, verifying, and explaining data to his management, colleagues, end-users, and friends.

And this is the year of the statistician ??

This is bare knuckles tactics. The art of Vaseline Insulting? Perish the thought. Geeks and Data Scientists rule.

Dont we? and we are perfect? right.

We statisticians (and data scientists and big dataists and data miners and business analysts and …)

are bringing sexy back!

(and we need a hug too.)

The dichotomy in being a writer on open source with a non-open access publisher

The publisher adds credibility to your work

versus

A self fulfilling prophecy where researchers want to publish in exclusive journals and closed -access books, for the sole reason that others did so as well before them and thereby donate their knowledge and money to the publisher

The dichotomy in being a writer on open source with a non-open access publisher?

I write on open source R ,
and I have been published (one book )
and am on contract to write two more ( R for Cloud Computing) and (R for Web and Social Media Analytics)
My publisher does have open access journals.
But the book is at $50. Most of India lives at less than 2$ per day. Thats 800 million people in my country alone.

But the publisher is the most reputed in this field. So what are my choices? How do I get more people to have choices to read books.

Take open knowledge , curate it, and turn it behind a $50 paywall. I am sorry, Aaron. People like me are the reason ……

Easier Tagging for E Commerce by Google Tag Manager

Ok I guess I am a bit late to this, but I really like the concept of Google Tag Manager https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ and the fact they have a WordPress plugin ready http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-tag-manager/. What does it do? It integrates all your tags on websites on one dashboard. So much easier Web Analytics for marketing people who dont want to learn Reg Ex , JS etc.

IT-friendly – Google Tag Manager has lots features to set your mind
at ease—like user permissions, automated error checking, the Debug
Console, and asynchronous technology. So everything runs efficiently,
with no unpleasant surprises.
• Quick and easy – Users add or change tags whenever they want, to
keep sites running smoothly and quickly. Tags are managed with an
easy-to-use web interface, so there’s no need to write or rewrite site
code following implementation.
• Verified tags & templates – Google Tag Manager makes it easy to
verify that new tags are working properly, so users don’t need to call on
IT to check the tags. Built-in tag templates and automatic error checking
also prevent tags with improper formatting from even being deployed
on your site.
• Swift loading – Google Tag Manager replaces all your measurement
and marketing tags with a single, asynchronously loading tag—so your
tags can fire faster without getting in each other’s way.

Tagging just got easier: Built-in templates for popular tags in Google Tag Manager (analytics.blogspot.com)

Proxmate- Browser plugins for Proxy Surfing to sites closed to certain countries

A neat technical innovation Proxmate is a browser plugin with a Chrome and Firefox version. It allows non US internet citizens to go to US sites , including Google’s Play Store, Spotify, Turntable and others

It is very professionally designed and now being used quite a lot.

Great Work by Dave Mohl at http://proxmate.dave.cx/

I wish the same principle could be applied to create a fork of Chromium /Firefox to mash up with the Tor do not track privacy software. Or if a fork is too much work- even a plugin 🙂