10 Best Ways to Learn Analytics Online

You know business analytics are crucial to the success of your organization. You know you need to improve your working BI knowledge.

But you don’t know where to start.

Here are our top ten (totally objective) picks for great online courses and resources to help you master the fundamentals of business analytics and take advantage of the tremendous opportunities better business intelligence can offer.

After all, access to easy learning is a key perk of the info revolution.

edX brings you courses from leading universities all over the world, including, Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley and more. Browse through until you find the course that best matches your needs. We recommend taking a close look at Statistical Thinking for Data Science, and Analytics taught by Andrew Gelman of the Statistical Inference, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog. It’s an excellent choice if you want to learn all about the role statistics plays in data science and analytics.

This course is perfect for business users who want predictive analytics. If you frequently generate or read forecasts, this is the course for you. In this course, top professors teach you key predictive analytics strategies such as how to evaluate the performance of forecasting methods and how to tie forecasting analytics in with the business challenges.

Codecademy is an absolute must for anyone with dreams of becoming a bona fide data analyst, and a major leg up for non-tech users who want to do more with data. SQL is the structured query language use by the vast majority of databases, CRMs, and business apps. Learn SQL, and you’ll know how to access and read data in almost any context. This course is incredibly practical, prompting you to run your SQL commands via an interactive interface.

Tied in with UN Global Goals, Big Data University offers a ton of great data analytics learning content with an ethical edge. Choose from courses covering Big Data Fundamentals or go deeper with courses on Hadoop Programming and more. Big Data U is the best option for “unofficial” data scientists who are interested in making a career and a difference.

Not ready to commit to a full course? Author and data analytics pro, Avinash Kaushik’s blog brings you timely expert insights on what’s happening in data analytics, all within a business context. With insightful use cases and an eye to the future, even analysts can learn something new here.

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