Coursera has some excellent courses coming up in 2013. Here are some potential curriculum paths for someone looking to learn data science.

Prerequisites

Either sequence requires/recommends some basic programming experience. If you are unfamiliar with programming, you still have a couple weeks to get familiar with some basic programming concepts. Some good places to start would be either Coursera’s Computer Science 101 or Codecademy’s Python tutorial.

Data Science Curriculum #1

If you are new to programming, this would be the recommend sequence. The first course focuses on programming.

Course Start Date Completion Date
Computing for Data Analysis Jan. 2, 2013 Jan. 25, 2013
Data Analysis Jan. 22, 2013 Mar. 15, 2013
Introduction to Data Science April 2013 June 2013

Data Science Curriculum #2

Course Start Date Completion Date
Computational Methods for Data Analysis Jan. 7, 2013 Mar. 15, 2013
Introduction to Data Science April 2013 June 2013

Additional Courses

Neither of the Coursera machine learning (Stanford or U of Washington) courses are scheduled for 2013, but either of them would be a great (maybe necessary) follow up course. Hopefully, one of those courses will be starting in July or shortly there after.

After completing one of the above sequences combined with a machine learning course, a person should be skilled enough to begin doing useful data science work. (Note: A new job as a data scientist is not guaranteed, but the courses won’t hurt your chances.) Plus, Coursera offers numerous other classes that could be taken at a later time to increase depth in certain areas of data science (Natural Language Processing, Image Processing, and more).

Happy Learning in 2013!

If you are interested in more ways to learn data science, please check out Data Science 201, coming in 2013.