edX: Introduction to Data Analytics for Managers Review

DS120x Introduction to Data Analytics for Managers is a 6 week primer on data analytics offered by the University of Michigan geared toward business people and managers who many not have a background in statistics or programming. The course has no prerequisites so it doesn't go into great technical depth, but it doesn't eschew details entirely either, so you should be ready to encounter some math and the principles of SQL. You'll also have to create an account to use Microsoft's cloud machine learning platform Azure ML to follow along with lecture and complete the assignments. Grading is based on 6 weekly homework assignments that consists of comprehension quizzes and short peer graded essays.

Weekly content is organized into 6 topic categories: a course introduction, data extraction and manipulation, descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. The course organization scheme provides a logical walk through the different components of data analytics projects in the same order you'd often tackle them in practice. Specific topics the course covers include the basics of databases and SQL queries, summary statistics, hypothesis testing and the basics of machine learning. Each section consists of 7 to 8 lecture segments on related to the weekly topic along with a section of resource links and references. The lectures themselves span anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes, with most falling into the 10 to 15 minute range. The professor explains concepts well, but since lectures are long and can feel slow at times, you may want to increase the video playback speed from time to time to keep things moving along.

Introduction to Data Analytics for Managers is a well-organized  course that provides a broad overview of the data analytics process that sometimes gets into more technical detail than one might expect from a course dubbed "for managers." In particular, the second week focuses on teaching the basics of SQL and several other weeks require you to work with data in Azure ML, which are tasks and topics you might not be interested in if you simply want to gain a high level understanding of the data analytics process.

I give Introduction to Data Analytics for Managers 3.75 out of 5 stars: Good.