Hi All,

My University is considering running a course on Big Data. It would cover analytics (big data mining), integration, database systems, parallel programming, and applications in business and science. Software covered would include Hadoop, Pentaho, programming in Open CL, CUDA, etc.

What I want to know is - would people take such a course and what would they like to learn about?

Thanks,
Kevin

It would help you to have a clear audience in mind. A computer programmer wanting to get into analysis will have different expectations and requirements compared to a research scientist with domain knowledge who needs to develop his/her skills to be able to deal with increasingly large datasets.

That's a lot of topics. Are you proposing a short course? A course unit? A Master's degree? Too much breadth and not enough depth might not be helpful.

Sorry, I should have said - it is a Masters degree, so that is 8 different modules.

Isn't that just management science/OR/business analytics anyway? I'm guessing anyone interested in those subjects would take it. You'd want to do some database coding skills too e.g. SQL and VBA (my hubby does this for his job, so I know vaguely what is required in the roles he looks at)