Free Online: UC Berkeley Offers Most Popular Course

BERKELEY, CA — Do you need to update your skills? UC Berkeley has a deal that's tough to beat.

California's flagship public university is taking its most popular on campus class, Foundations of Data Science, and offering it online for free. You access the class through the campus’s online education hub, edX.

The Public Affairs Office says the course covers everything from testing hypotheses, applying statistical inferences, visualizing distributions and drawing conclusions, all while coding in Python and using real-world data sets.

“You’ll learn to program when studying data science — but not for the purpose of building apps or games,” says Berkeley computer science Professor John DeNero. “Instead, we use programming to understand the world around us.”

The Foundations of Data Science edX Professional Certificate program is a sequence of three five-week courses taught by three winners of Berkeley’s top teaching honor, the Distinguished Teaching Award: DeNero, statistics professor Ani Adhikari and computer science professor David Wagner.

Anyone in the world can enroll for free. However, if you are interested in earning a certificate you will need to pay. The certificate is an incredible deal: $357.30 for the entire program. The university says that each course takes 5 to 6 weeks, with an investment of 4 to 6 hours per week, per course.

According to Glassdoor, the average salary for an Entry Level Data Scientist is $118,748. Nice return on $357.30

The first of the three parts starts on Monday, April 2. Enrollment will remain open after the course begins.

— Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images