edX: Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials Review

Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials is a 5-week introductory data science course offered by Microsoft through edX that focuses on teaching students how to use Microsoft's cloud-based machine learning platform, Azure ML. The course divides content into two tracks, an R track and a Python track, so you can complete the course with either language, but you'll need to know the basics of at least one of the two. Grading is based on 5 weekly reviews and a single 20 question exam.


The course title "Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials" is misleading because this course is not really about data science or machine learning per se. The first week attempts to cram an entire machine learning course or two worth of concepts into a handful of mediocre lectures, while the remainder of the course is all about Azure ML. Weeks 2-5 provide a nice overview of Azure ML and the fact that it has full lectures for both R and Python is a great feature that surely took a lot of extra time and effort to produce. The main lecturer's presentation skills aren't the best, but the videos are still easy to follow. Azure ML offers a lot of interesting functionality, like the ability to use Python and R scrips in the same project and publish projects as web services, but some of the exercises were tedious and ran slowly.


If data "Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials" were renamed "Intro to Azure ML" and only included the content in weeks 2-5, it would be a good course. Weeks 2-5 are definitely worth checking out if you are interested in Azure ML. As it stands now, however, the first week bombards students with far too many concepts explained too quickly to foster real understanding and sets the wrong expectations for the remainder of the course.


I give Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials 2.75 out of 5: mediocre.