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Word of the Day: phalanx
This word has appeared in 55 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
What does it take to succeed in a Data Science Program?
Meet Anne! She’s the Senior Instructor and Associate Chair at the University of Colorado, Department of Applied Mathematics, and has been an educator since 1984. This semester, she’s teaching a Foundation for Data Science course on Coursera and was kind enough to offer four tips to learners interested in the field of Data Science.
Self-motivation
Anytime you’re learning online, you need to be self-motivated. You have to really want to spend the time on the material. It helps if you have an end goal in mind – a specific type of job – or you want to move into a new field.
Knowledge of Mathematics
This material can be challenging, but we’ll work with you and we try to help you get to that Aha! moment where you start to see how the various topics that we’re covering are connected. At the most fundamental level, the language is mathematics. If you understand that language, then you’re able to create all sorts of stories in whatever field you’re interested in. That applies to every technical discipline. Data science is not an impossible field, but it does require a good understanding of mathematics and a willingness to learn new material. So you really need to be successful from a mathematical standpoint. You need to have a good understanding of calculus One and Two and some linear algebra, even in the introductory courses in the statistics and data science track.
Determination
As a student in a program like this, you have to find a way to balance life, work, and school. Learners have had family issues come up, and we’ve made accommodations for them. With Coursera, we’re able to offer you flexibility that you won’t find at a traditional institution. That’s what allows you to receive an education while managing work and family. In the long run, your success will result in an increase in self-confidence and self-worth, and you’ll gain new skills that you can apply in your current job, or to move to a different job.
Self-awareness
I always tell students that you need to follow your interests. Be interested in the area. You shouldn’t do it because you think it’ll get you a better job. That’s an excellent byproduct, but if you’re not truly interested in the material, I think it’s really hard to make that long term commitment to go through this program. If you really like the material and you’re curious about it however, I think it’s a great program at an absolutely top notch university, and can really help set you up for success down the road.
Thanks so much, Anne!
We hope you enjoyed hearing from Anne as much as we did. If you’re interested in learning data skills and possibly earning a credential, check out the Probability Theory: Foundation for Data Science course – part of the Data Science Foundations specialization available on Coursera. You’ll learn the foundations of probability and its relationship to statistics and data science from leading industry professionals like Anne.
Join the ranks of future digital leaders with the Digital Transformation Certificate from Dartmouth
With the Digital Transformation Certificate from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, you can become a digital transformation leader with the skills to deliver high-impact organizational change. To celebrate the launch of this new certificate, we’re hearing from two learners who enrolled in the program’s first cohort in January 2022.
Marcin Dembowski, an Organizational Transformation and Change Specialist based in Poland, enrolled in the Digital Transformation Certificate to deepen his understanding of corporate innovation challenges and digital transformation. “I work in change management consulting in the academic publishing business, and privately, I’m very much involved in real estate business and residential estates building projects. When I noticed that Dartmouth College was planning to offer comprehensive certificates on the Coursera platform starting in 2022, I enrolled straightaway.”
“Digital transformation is a real challenge for organizations and, unfortunately, not many know how to handle it,” said Marcin. “Many companies are mainly focused on the technical part of it, completely ignoring other aspects.”
Natasha Vincent, the Director of Partnerships for a national health charity, also enrolled in the certificate in January 2022. Her goal was to leverage her interest in technology and coding as part of either senior leadership or executive teams. “The intersection between communications, health, and technology is where I thrive. Enrolling in this program was a terrific way to learn about digital transformation from a variety of angles ranging from case studies to coding.”
In today’s current world, it’s not a matter of if (or even when) learners should begin focusing on digital transformation. It’s a matter of how.
According to McKinsey’s 2021 report, The New Digital Edge: Rethinking Strategy for the Post-Pandemic Era, 89 percent of top executives believe that by 2023, they will need to build new digital strategies or implement existing technology to stay competitive. Building up the necessary skills to help carry out this digital transformation is key for learners looking to seize new market opportunities in the future.
That’s where Dartmouth’s certificate comes in. Over four courses, you will learn how to harness AI, machine learning, and design solutions to implement strategies in your organizations to boost innovation and streamline operations.
“The program is very comprehensive and delivered very well, all four subjects,” said Marcin. “Of course, having a chance to watch the live session with Professor Geoffrey G. Parker, academic guru of the platform business strategy, was an extremely valuable experience.”
When we asked our learners to offer one tip for students who are starting the certificate program, Natasha told us, “Polish up on your Python and people skills. Python will help you get up to speed with the coding aspect of the program, and people skills will help you interact with all of the fascinating students you will be meeting around the world during your group projects.”
Marcin had this to add: “If you decide to start the program, dedicate as much time as possible. Watch all videos carefully and make notes, read all that is recommended, and participate in office hours. This is just the beginning, so the more you invest, the more you get back.”
What Role Do Trees Play in Your Neighborhood?
How can trees make a town or city a better place to live?
Bookshelf
Tell us a story, real or made up, that is inspired by this image.
Word of the Day: cajole
This word has appeared in 103 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
Banned Books, Censored Topics: Teaching About the Battle Over What Students Should Learn
Suggestions for using recent Times and Learning Network articles, videos, podcasts, student forums and more.
Discover how Luis Plata was able to gain a master’s and certificate while working full time
Luis Plata was a senior mechanical engineer before joining CU Boulder’s MS-EE on Coursera Program. In January 2021, Luis obtained the Internet of Things Certificate on Coursera, and in December 2021, Luis graduated from the MS-EE program and was able to attend CU Boulder’s May 2022 graduation ceremony. Read more to learn about his experience with the MS-EE program!
When did you enroll in the MS-EE on Coursera Program?
I enrolled in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the second summer semester.
Were you in the non-credit version prior to enrolling in the for-credit version?
I attempted the free course for the sensor course, and I was hooked and wanted to pursue this further.
What was your educational and work experience background before you enrolled in this program?
I was in a multidisciplinary role, I did quite a bit of mechanical engineering, software engineering, but a big focus of my role was in electrical engineering and so it felt very natural to continue to pursue that in an academic way and solidify my background understanding.
What attracted you to this program in the first place?
Definitely the content. I felt the content offerings at the time and what they were advertising for the future was very attractive. To give you an example, one of the pathway courses, the Sensors and Motors courses, was basically what I was doing in my career at the time. I was able to take a lot of what I was doing in my Day-to-Day career and really be able to see a lot of background information I didn’t have, things that I learned while doing on the job, later I was able to go through the lecture and see why that works that way. Seeing the quality and extent of the content was a big selling point for me. Second big selling point was that it was an online, asynchronous master’s program. There’s a lot of master’s programs out there for softer sciences and for computer science with this set up but for Electrical Engineering not so much. When I first saw it, I wondered why there aren’t that many out there and how CU Boulder is pulling it off but when you see what exactly is being taught in these courses you understand why this was a good thing and why it worked for me at the time.
What are your thoughts about performance-based admission?
I did not know about this before starting. I took the first course (free Sensors Course) and began reading through the website and it became apparent. At first, I was confused because it was not traditional. I am aware of a couple more programs that are doing this now, but it was not something I was accustomed to at the time. So, to be able to really jump at it without having this soft barrier of entry was helpful. It really made it easier for me to see the value of the program without having to consider, do I really want to pay this application fee for something I might not get into.
I think what really helped sell that it was real for me was that it was during the pandemic and a lot of places were getting rid of GRE requirements and that type of set up.
The performance-based admissions were very useful in getting started and being able to tell this is something I want to keep doing.
How did you learn/hear about CU Boulder’s MS-EE on Coursera Program?
I was researching remote and asynchronous opportunities in the field I work in. I previously worked in a multidisciplinary environment. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do but knew that electrical engineering was definitely an option. While I was exploring my options from reputable companies, I came across Coursera and all the different degree options available, including Electrical Engineering, which is a topic I particularly enjoy and had previous experience in which is why I choose to pursue that.
Can you tell me how the MS-EE on Coursera program fits into your life?
I think this is the greatest strength of the program, the fact that it is asynchronous and has the flexibility that has allowed me to succeed. It would have been extremely difficult to go through a traditional program where I know I would have to be at school at a certain time and work around having a career and a kid. Let me give one example of this. Not all courses were good for this but many courses I would have the lecture playing in the background while commuting to work and when I get home and my kid is asleep, I could listen to it a second time and I can really pay attention and am no longer hearing it the first time so the content can get really deep in my mind and I am really understanding it much better that way.
What are your favorite parts of the program?
There is so much. One of my concerns starting this program with it being remote, especially at the master’s level, was how much collaboration and interaction am I going to be able to have with classmates, but that was not something I felt I was lacking as I was going through the program. The Forums and use of Slack really helped create a sense of community, such as there are a lot of other students struggling with the same problem I am, and we can all get in together and chat about it. The availability of the course facilitators was also great, to be able to know that there was always someone there so I can hop online, and someone will be there to help me with whatever problem or roadblock I am facing, was a great part of the program for me.
I really enjoyed the Sensors courses, but I am biased towards them as that was what I was doing, so I could really immediately see I am reading about temperature sensors and tomorrow I am going to go to work and install some temperature sensors and so that worked great.
The battery management courses were fantastic. I really enjoyed these courses. I thought the professor was really engaging and the material was very interesting, especially how it relates to all the changes in technology that we are seeing nowadays. Plus, the assignments were particularly enjoyable, as far as not only learning about the content but also applying it, there was quite a bit of software involved with it and I enjoyed this interaction between the two. Knowing how to do Electrical Engineering and applying it by writing software.
I also enjoyed the Optics course, but I have a personal bias as there was a project, I was working on at work that wasn’t going anywhere and we couldn’t figure out why and then I learned why through the optics courses, there was some fundamental issues that my team just didn’t have the background knowledge. I was able to go back to work and say “this is why that project failed, we had this incorrect assumption.”
What do you hope to do with your MS-EE degree?
Career changes and advancements have already materialized which is great for me and my family. One of the courses that I learned, developing industrial internet of things specialization courses, the professor, David Sluiter, one of things he talked about was getting the project management professional certificate. He talked a lot about how those fits into the general realm of project engineering. I saw that as a great thing to pursue and so I went out and I got a PMP and using my Master of Science in Electrical Engineering plus the certification that I learned about through the program, I was able to pursue the job I currently work at, at Boeing as a Project Engineer. It was really a great step up in my career at that point. If I hadn’t made that switch, I know I would have been able to use this degree to advance at my previous employer too.
Would you recommend this program to others? Why or why not?
I actively recommend this program to anybody that I feel may be interested in, pursuing, or is looking into something like this. The content is fantastic, I learned a lot, and the flexibility of having an asynchronous program, and really being able to fit it into a busy schedule was enabling. It would have been difficult to do otherwise.
The performance-based admission part of it is something that really opens a lot of doors for people like me who didn’t really have them before. I didn’t complete my bachelors before this program. I was really close to finishing and I started my career and was not able to finish it before because I could not fit in going to school at a traditional program and work full time, which I needed to do at the time and so the performance-based admission was life changing for me.
What is one tip you have for students who are starting?
Take your time. Beyond the fantastic content, the great instructors, the name that CU Boulder has, at the end of the day, you have got to use whatever tools and advantages you have and the biggest one with this program is the flexibility that this program allows you to have. So, take your time. There is no shame in taking it one course at a time.
What Is Open Source?
Think about the website you use the most often: Maybe it’s a social media site, a food delivery app, or a site you use for work. There are probably things you like about it. Maybe it’s nice to look at or really easy to use. But there are also probably some things that could be improved. Now, what if you could make those improvements yourself?
Unfortunately, this isn’t possible on most websites. The source code, or the code that was used to build the website, is very likely proprietary — meaning it was written by a certain company, and only the people who work for that company have permission to view and change it. But this isn’t always the case; that’s where open source comes in.
What does open source mean?
Open-source software is software whose code is free to view, modify, and distribute. It’s usually created and maintained by a community of volunteer Software Developers who collaborate on websites like GitHub. Anybody with an internet connection can view the code, and they can even suggest changes or point out issues that need to be fixed.
While many open-source projects are software projects, the concept of “open source” can be applied to many disciplines. For example, hardware specifications (like 3D printer models), data sets, and other digital assets can also be open source. Here, we’ll focus on the term “open source” as it applies to software projects.
Every active open-source software project has one or more maintainers. These are the people who steward the project and make sure it remains free from bugs or other problems. In other words, they “maintain” the project.
While they may spend their time writing code for the project, their main priority is to review and organize contributions from others. The people who make those contributions are aptly called contributors. These are people who submit new code, documentation, or even bug reports to open-source projects.
Open-source software projects can vary in size. Some projects might just have one person who both maintains and contributes to them, while others have over 1,000 contributors! In fact, many of the libraries and frameworks used by the largest companies are open source. React, for example, is a popular open-source library used by companies like Twitter, Netflix, and TikTok. (And we use it too!)
So how did the open-source movement as we know it come to be?
The history of open source
In the 1980’s, some Software Developers noticed a troubling trend: The software industry was gravitating more and more towards creating proprietary software. This presented a few problems:
First, if the developers noticed a bug in the software they were using, it was impossible for them to fix it themselves. They would have to wait for the company that created the software to release a new version, which could take months, or even years.
Second, if the company that created the software went out of business, the developers would either be stuck with old software, or they would be forced to buy new software from a different company, only to repeat the cycle all over again.
For example, the researchers at MIT who studied operating systems in the 1960s and ‘70s worked on PDP-10 computers. When these computers were discontinued in the early ‘80s, MIT replaced them with new computers that had different, proprietary operating systems. Twenty years of the researchers’ work was rendered obsolete because they could no longer use the same operating system as they had before.
To reverse this trend, researchers at MIT and the University of Helsinki began working on the first open-source operating systems: GNU and Linux. In 1985, many people didn’t have access to the internet, so in order to collaborate, developers would have to send each other physical tapes containing the source code.
At the time, this was called the “free software” movement, but it laid the groundwork for what we now know as the “open-source” movement. The term “open source” wasn’t even invented until the late 1990s. In 1998, the source code for the internet browser Netscape was made publicly available. Anticipating that other software projects would follow suit, an employee of Foresight Institute named Christine Peterson ultimately pitched the name “open source,” coining the term that would define this movement for decades to come.
Open source now
Open source has come a long way since developers sent each other code on tape via snail mail. Now, people can share their open-source code on sites like GitHub within seconds. In fact, there are over 45 million open-source repositories on GitHub (as of April 2022).
According to a 2022 report from Synposis, 97% of commercial codebases use open-source components, and 78% of code is open source. Even the largest tech companies, like Meta, Amazon, and Google, rely on and maintain open-source software projects.
The open-source movement has grown so much in the last 40 years, and that’s because open-source software offers powerful benefits to the software community as a whole.
The benefits of open source
The open-source movement has become a way to establish new standards in the software industry. Once again, think about your favorite websites: They probably have many of the same features, such as login and signup, user-to-user messaging, and payment processing.
Now, if each of the companies that build those sites had to write software from scratch to enable these features, this would result in many duplicate implementations that would each have their own distinct problems and bugs to fix. Open source provides a standard way of implementing these features that the entire developer community can build, test, and maintain together — so everybody wins.
Many of the commonly used tools in the industry, such as operating systems, internet browsers, and coding languages, are open-source projects. Remember Linux, one of the open-source operating systems built at the start of the free software movement? Today, it’s a standard for operating systems across the entire industry.
There are many examples of widely used software that benefited from being open source, but let’s highlight the Chromium project.
Chromium
When Google open-sourced Chromium, the software that underlies the Google Chrome browser, they also released a new JavaScript engine, which implemented a series of improvements and optimizations in the JavaScript language.
Soon, all browsers began adopting this standard, and all websites saw an improvement in performance and efficiency. Because Google’s work was open source, and many engineers tested and maintained it, the entire industry benefited.
Kiwi TCMS
The beauty of open source is that if a company that maintains a popular open-source project decides to abandon it, another company or a group of community volunteers can continue to maintain it, keeping it available for the industry to use.
Take Kiwi TCMS, an open-source test management system, as an example. In 2009, the company Red Hat, Inc released the project under the name “Nitrate.” But by 2017, they were no longer accepting new contributions — the project had been abandoned.
Seeing value in the project, one of its contributors decided to create a fork (essentially creating a new branch off of the original version) and maintain it himself. Kiwi TCMS, as the project is currently called, is still maintained today, and has over 1 million downloads from DockerHub (a popular platform that allows developers to easily download and set up open-source software).
How to participate in open source
Ready to join the open-source community? Contributing to open-source projects will hone your abilities as a developer and help you build skills you’ll use throughout your career. Not only will you learn how to work with other people’s code and collaborate with other devs to create new features, you’ll also develop good documentation habits and project management skills that’ll help you hit the ground running in your first role.
“There are lots of things that translate directly from working on an open-source project to working in a company where you’ll collaborate with multiple developers, product teams, and non-tech related folks as well,” says Matt Bacchi, Codecademy Senior DevOps Engineer.
Plus, having open-source projects on your resume goes a long way with recruiters and hiring managers when you’re looking for a job. “Having some personal projects in your GitHub profile is great,” Matt says. “But contributing to open-source projects shows potential employers that you have the whole process under your belt and understand how the workflow operates.”
But where do you begin?
First, check out our free Introduction to Open Source course. We’ll teach you everything you need to know to get started, including how to find projects on GitHub, contribute your own code, read and write documentation, report bugs, and even create your own project. You may also want to read through this list of open-source terminology. (It’ll help keep you from getting confused by all the technical jargon.)
Then it’s time to find your first project! “Find a project you’re interested in and see if there’s an issue that you can understand and try to solve,” Matt says. “That’s how many of us get started — it’s just seeing a need and jumping in with both feet.”
Matt also suggests searching for projects labeled “beginner-friendly,” “easy fix,” or “good first issue” on GitHub. And while open-source contributions are usually volunteer, you can also find paid opportunities on sites like GitHub and HackerOne that offer money and other rewards for finding security vulnerabilities in company websites.
Are there any companies you’d love to work for? Check to see if they have any open-source projects. According to Matt, contributing might help you land a job. “I’ve actually seen people be hired from working on open-source projects for free before they eventually became an employee,” he says.
Need more ideas? Check out this list of projects you can contribute to right now.
Open Source Courses & Tutorials | Codecademy
Open source software is open to distribution and modification by anyone in the world – that could be you! Open source projects are not only a way to contribute to the free technology movement, but also a great way to experiment with new languages and frameworks in a welcoming community. The open sou…
