eLearningCurve: Delivering State-of-the-Art Data Science Education to Bridge Skills Gap Across Industry

eLearningCurve offers comprehensive online education and certification programs in various disciplines of information management including data quality, data governance, data integration, data management, analytics, and data science. The institute was established to make top-quality education in information management disciplines available to busy professionals wherever and whenever they are able to study and learn. eLearningCurve's courses begin with fundamentals that teach the basic concepts and principles then move quickly to more advanced topics to teach practical skills that can be immediately applied in the workplace.

The institute recognizes data science as a multi-disciplinary field that encompasses both data analysis and data engineering skills, and as a multi-domain field where business, statistical, research, and technical knowledge converge. eLearningCurve's broad curriculum includes courses to address all dimensions of data science. The current, and continuously, growing course catalog includes:

•  Data Science Fundamentals

•  Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence

•  Fundamentals of Machine Learning

•  Fundamentals of Predictive Analytics

•  Putting the Science in Data Science

•  Framing and Planning of Data Science Projects

•  Data Understanding and Preparation for Data Science

•  Analytics Modeling, Evaluation, and Deployment

•  Diagnostic Analytics Using Statistical Process Control

•  Prescriptive Analytics Using Simulation Models

•  Data Mining Concepts and Techniques

•  Data Mining in R

•  Big Data Strategy

•  Introduction to NoSQL

•  Hadoop Fundamentals

•  Streaming Data Concepts, Applications, and Techniques

Future courses at various stages of planning and development cover topics such as natural language processing, data science, and robotics, modernizing data architectures for data science, data engineering, data pipelines, and data operations for data science.

A Strategic Leadership

Dave Wells is the Director of Education at eLearningCurve where he plans and manages curriculum, seeks highly-qualified course authors and instructors, assures technical accuracy and instructional quality of courses, and oversees the exam writing process. He is also an author and instructor of several eLearningCurve courses where he draws on more than 50 years of experience working with data and information systems. For the Data Science curriculum, Dave ensures the quality of instructors and courses, and he personally contributes courses about data engineering, data pipeline design, DataOps, and data architecture.

Offering Rich and Robust Curriculum

eLearningCurve offers the ideal learning experience for busy professionals who are pursuing career growth in the field of data science. Rich and robust curriculum with a logical progression from basics to advanced topics is only part of the story. Dave believes that "The ability to learn at your own pace, and to study at the times and in the locations that work best for you is especially important for those who must find time for learning while attending to the demands of a full-time job."

The value of eLearningCurve education is further enhanced with examination and certification. The examination process—an essential part of certification—also provides opportunities for students to evaluate their knowledge, recognize gaps in learning, and revisit the courses to fill those gaps. The institute's Certified Information Management Professional (CIMP) designation for data science professionals makes a clear statement that the student has learned from the industry leaders and has demonstrated a thorough understanding of data science by passing several challenging exams. The CIMP-Ex Data Science designation goes beyond certification of knowledge and understanding, to also attest to the expertise, experience, and excellence demonstrated by data science professionals.

Focusing on Practical Learning and Experiences

eLearningCurve's course authors and instructors are also practitioners. They go beyond theory and academics to enrich the courses with examples, case studies, and storytelling about their experiences working in the field. The more technical courses get deep into the details of putting the technology to work. The institute's Data Mining in R course, for example, shows how to use basic features of the R programming language, and to work with data frames, data reshaping, basic statistics, graphing, linear models, non-linear models, clustering, and model diagnostics.

Fostering Industry with Applied Knowledge

eLearningCurve contributes to the growth of analytics and big data education by providing practical education that works for business and technical professionals who are working in related fields. The institute's education helps people to fill the gaps that exist in data science hiring and staffing today. It is well documented that the demand for skilled data scientists far outstrips the supply. For the data engineering side of data science, the shortage is especially severe. It is highly competitive, time-consuming, and costly to fill data science positions. Many enterprises choose to grow skills from within as more practical than competing for the small number of available data scientists. This is where eLearningCurve makes a substantial contribution by providing the means for internal staff to learn and grow data science knowledge and capabilities.

Significant Educational Partnership

The Enterprise Data Management Council (EDM Council) selected eLearningCurve as their partner to deliver education to their member organizations. EDM Council is a global organization that works to advance data management and analytics best practices, standards, and education. The council's high standards for education and eLearningCurve's attention to quality are a natural fit that delivers the right kind of learning to council members including many of the world's largest financial services organizations, plus corporations from other major industries.

Today, eLearningCurve has students in more than 80 countries—more than 40% of the nations in the world. This includes India where both eLearningCurve and EDM Council are experiencing significant momentum and demand for sophisticated data and analytics learning programs.

Winning Against Challenges with Persistence

The greatest challenge has also proven to be one of the greatest opportunities for rewards. According to Dave, the challenge is in finding instructors with a right combination of theoretical knowledge in the advanced areas of data science, practical experience that is necessary to get from theory to application, and instructional design and teaching skills needed to create and deliver high-quality and high-impact education. Instructors with these qualities are difficult to find, but through persistence and tenacity eLearningCurve now has a cadre of instructors who are among the best in the field of data science.

The Driving Force of Technology Advancements

The amount of data that is available today, according to Dave, is one of the driving forces, as are the technology advances that provide the capacity and performance to process and analyze huge volumes of data. The most powerful driver of all, however, comes from a business perspective. Analytics produces insights. Analytics creates a competitive advantage. And ultimately, analytics drives the innovation that is critical to survival in the digital economy.

Envisioning the Future of Analytics

Dave believes, "We will see remarkable continued growth well into the future. Education will thrive as long as there is a shortage of skilled candidates to fill data science positions. Today the skills-demand gap continues to grow, and we will experience corresponding growth in the need for analytics and data science education."