Whether you’re a recent college grad or a 20 year IT veteran, it’s always a good idea to freshen up your skills and expand your knowledge. Taking it upon yourself to learn as much as you can about new IT trends and emerging tools in technology could be the key to your next big career move. And you can do it for free!
Big Data University – Big Data Fundamentals
This 1.5 hour free Big Data course is for anyone looking to get a beginner’s understanding of Big Data from what it is to why we are interested in it. The course includes six videos that are accompanied by downloadable .pdf transcript handouts so you can follow along at your own pace.
http://bigdatauniversity.com/bdu-wp/bdu-course/big-data-fundamentals/
Big Data and Hadoop Essentials
Essential Knowledge for everyone associated with Big Data & Hadoop
Digging a little further into Hadoop’s role in Big Data, this course explores the history of Hadoop and the value it provides to Big Data. Broken into two sections, the course includes eight videos with six lessons and six quizzes to be completed after each video. This is a great course for learning the fundamentals of Hadoop as it relates to Big Data and testing your knowledge along the way.
Harvard Extension School
Massively Parallel Computing
If podcasts are your thing, check out the variety of free courses provided by the Harvard Extension School in the iTunes store. Massively Parallel Computing offers hands-on experience with parallel programming, hardware architecture, multi-threaded programming, GPU programming, cluster computing, and MapReduce using Hadoop and EC2.
Java for Complete Beginners
Learn to program using the Java programming language
Because Hadoop is Java based, this course would be great for any IT professional that wants to better position themselves for Big Data positions. The only requirement for this course is a basic fluency with computers and the course contains 75 lectures and over 16 hours of content.
Getting Started with IBM BLU
This quick, two hour course explores BLU for Cloud in a way that is most helpful to Business Analysts. Advanced analytics, designing reports and dashboards, and accessing BLU from Excess or access are some of the areas the course covers. There is a beginner course called Getting Started with IBM BLU Acceleration for Cloud (here) that will be helpful to take before this one if you haven’t already.