The most attractive profession of the twenty first century is a Data Analyst, according to the American edition of Harvard Business Review, and it is possible to get in Ukraine now; and it is for free, for a few months, from the leading Ukrainian teachers. This unique opportunity is provided by a joint initiative of the International Renaissance Foundation, Ukrainian public project of massive open online courses "Prometheus" and the Think Tank Fund, supported by the Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine (SIDA).
The most attractive profession of the twenty first century is a Data Analyst, according to the American edition of Harvard Business Review, and it is possible to get in Ukraine now; and it is for free, for a few months, from the leading Ukrainian teachers. This unique opportunity is provided by a joint initiative of the International Renaissance Foundation, Ukrainian public project of massive open online courses “Prometheus” and the Think Tank Fund, supported by the Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine (SIDA).
Data analysis is an approach which is developed quite actively in the West, but is not taught on a modern level in the universities of Ukraine systematically. The project is an ambitious attempt to start the process.
Registration on a cycle of courses began on the educational web platform «Prometheus», and it is rapid.
“It took only a few weeks from the launch of registration and the number of applicants for each course is more than 3,000 people in the midst of the holiday season. The first course starts in October and they will go in turns so with such a pace of setting the audience before training, we rack up at least 10,000 to each of them,” says a founder of Ukrainian online educational platform “Prometheus” Ivan Prymachenko.
Data analysis is a modern discipline of how to find the data, process it, draw conclusions and make decisions to improve the economy, society and the world around. The project aims to create a professional from the scratch and consists of four courses “Data Analysis and Statistical Inference in Language R”, “Machine Learning”, “Data Visualization”, “Processing and Analyzing of Big Data.”
Project organizers are sure that the data analysis course will be a success not only in the network. Since the beginning of the new school year «Prometheus» has been implementing its blended education pilot project, integrating a modern web product into a conservative educational process of leading Ukrainian universities.
“Nowadays, education is an industry that needs a qualitative change through innovations and development dynamics,” – emphasizes Ivan Prymachenko.
This position of one of the founders of Ukrainian Coursera is convincing for IRF, which chose “Prometheus” as a partner for the realization of one of the directions of the educational program.
“A year ago, when we started working with the platform of online courses «Prometheus», it had been in the market no more than a year, but it consisted of about 200 thousand users. It is about a quarter of a million and forty-one course on different topics today. This is a huge audience and a tremendous opportunity to learn from the best professors in the world and Ukraine for free,” says Democratic Practice Program Initiative Manager at the International Renaissance Foundation Sophiya Golota.
According to her, three courses were jointly implemented: “Women and Men: Gender for All”, “Urbanism: Modern City”, “Sociology and Social Studies.” They gathered a considerable audience.
“Such an understandable for the civilized world and far from the realities of Ukraine theme of gender, surprisingly, brought together 5,000 users and also has an active forum without trolls and haters. This course was successfully completed by 13% of the audience that with the average 7% is quite high. The project of a modern city development which we did with the SEDOS think tank, became generally the first online course on this issue in Ukraine. Regarding the demand for new knowledge in sociology, professional sociologists and journalists decided to join. Our new joint project with «Prometheus» and TEXTY will be a courses cycle in data analysis and will have a guaranteed success, because it is a mainstream in the analytic world and request for experts is crazy, much bigger than offers on the market,” says Sofiya Golota.
Online learning is a mainstream in modern education. Since Stanford University launched massive first open online courses in the fall of 2011, their number is growing at a breakneck pace. During the last year their number increased by 300% in the world. The advantages are obvious because they are available to all interested in new knowledge without any geographic, age, financial and other constraints. Lectures by the best teachers from the most prestigious universities in the world you can listen to for free and without a risk of being expelled for being hooky. We only need to organize ourselves, determine the future perspective and switch on a computer.
“A person who graduated from university and skipped the further training is doomed in a professional sense. He can’t compete with other professionals who continue to learn. More and more people and companies realize that. Employers are active as far as their employees’ knowledge increase is a key to their success,” emphasizes Ivan Prymachenko.
By Maryna Bondarenko
