Just a day after it announced it had partnered with CodeMentor, Andela today had another first by partnering with Big Data University, an IBM initiative to spread big data literacy to Africa.
“Our mission at Big Data University is to democratize access to practical skills for working with data. To do so we need to remove two big impediments: money and time. To that end, we made everything that you need to learn free. Free courses, free access to all the tools, free data – free everything and not for a few days or weeks – forever,” says BDU on its site.
Big Data University follows the “learn any time” delivery model and students take as long as they need to complete the courses to receive a Certificate of Completion.
Launched last year, BDU aims to 1 million data scientists around the world in the next 10 years by offering courses in big data and databases. Andela is coming on board to help IBM train future data scientists and increase interest into big data among the tech community.
There are three versions of Big Data University todate, the BigDataUniversity.com: the global version which primarily provides courses in English, but does have some courses in Japanese, Spanish and Russian. The second one is theBigDataUniversity.com.br launched at the end of July 2015 for students in Brazil with courses in Portuguese and lastly, theBigDataUniversity.com.cn launched at the end of August 2015 for students in China with courses in Mandarin and hosted in China.
The university recently partnered with the United Nations to educate one million people on the Sustainable Development Goals and help UN achieve these goal by leveraging data analytics.
