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While we now know that self-isolation is the best choice for self-care and to help protect others from contacting COVID-19, self-isolation doesn’t need to be a negative experience.
Instead, self-isolation can be turned into a unique opportunity for self care with some pretty great online courses as we finally get enough time to take care of ourselves.
Turning off our socials and limiting our news intake can help staunch fear, and instead doing online coursework at home might be an attractive option for self-isolation to learn some new, useful tech skills. (Also read: Top Tech Skills to Acquire by 2020 — and the Courses to Get You There.)
Here’s a list of 10 useful online courses you can take during your self-care time to hone your tech skills and learn new abilities.
Machine Learning
Offered by: Stanford University
Do we really need to explain how important machine learning (ML) is today? The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is spearheading our technological advancement and has taken huge steps across the whole 2019 and 2020. (Also read: Is the AI Revolution Going to Make Universal Income a Necessity?)
Knowing more about the science behind intelligent machines is paramount as this technology is disrupting nearly all verticals.
This course will teach you both the theoretical underpinnings of the field of ML and its practical applications and know-how. You will learn all you need about data mining, supervised and unsupervised learning, statistical pattern recognition and all the best practices in machine learning.
All backed up by a ton of actionable use cases. (Also read: Top 20 AI Use Cases: Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.)
Google IT Support
Isn’t smart working simply fantastic? Well, if you like it as much as I do, becoming a Google IT support can be a smart choice. With this course you will learn how to provide remote help desk support and troubleshooting to SMBs and global companies.
Since theory is nothing without practice, this Professional Certificate program will give you access to many hands-on labs and simulations that will test your newly-acquired skills in many real-world scenarios.
A Google initiative to grow with the giant multinational, this course will also give you the opportunity to share your entry-level resume with top employers, such as Intel, Walmart, Infosys, Hulu, Cognizant and many more.
IBM Data Science
Learning about data science is another solid choice if you want to skyrocket your career.
Especially if you already taken or are interested in taking the ML course above, coupling it with data science is a great way to broaden your horizons and enrich your knowledge.
You don’t even need prior knowledge in programming to learn this skill. This course will provide you access to a wide range of tools, algorithms, data sets, and libraries at no cost to learn and practice hands-on with real-world data sets.
Python for Everybody
Offered by: University of Michigan
Today, Python is becoming one of the most used programming languages ever. (Learn: Why is Python so popular in machine learning?)
Both for high-level and general-purpose coding tasks, Python can be used for developing all types of web and GUI applications, websites, and databases. A great “basic” skill to add to a well-rounded resume, Python knowledge is also the most solid foundation upon which you can build a career in ML or data sciences.
This hands-on course is an introductory one that will teach you the core programming concepts of this language, including how to create databases, networked application program interfaces, and data structures.
You will be guided step by step through creating your own apps for extracting, parsing, processing and visualizing data.
Applied Data Science with Python
Offered by: University of Michigan
After learning the ropes with the previous introductory-level course, it’s now time to take a dive into applied data science with Python. These five specialization courses offered by the University of Michigan will teach you data science fundamentals, such as how to apply information visualization, text analysis, and ML with the Python programming language.
You will learn how to create charts and data representation, apply statistical models, and perform social network analysis with popular python toolkits such as matplotlib and pandas.
Deep Learning
Together with ML, deep learning is another branch of AI that, if mastered, will help you spearhead a successful career in this technology field. This deep learning course will teach you all about neural networks, Xavier/He initialization, Convolutional networks, Adam, Dropout, and much more through use cases on autonomous cars, healthcare tech, and natural language processing (NLP).
Deeplearning.ai also created Course 5, Sequence Models in partnership with NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute. Take a step further and learn how to build a deep learning project with a programming assignment on Machine Translation.
Data Science
Offered by: Johns Hopkins University
By now, we already know how important data science is. This course will guide you through all the concepts and tools you will need to master the data sciences step-by-step.
You’ll learn it from bottom to top — like what are the right questions you need to ask to make inferences, and how to publish your results in the most readable and understandable way.
You will learn how to build a data product with real-world data, including visualizations to communicate your results.
AI For Everyone
If this course is called AI for everyone it means that’s AI for you, as well. So, why don’t you take it? This course is aimed at all non-specialized workers who do not have an engineering degree that want to know and learn more about AI.
Perfect for non-technical professions, it will help you (or your employees) learn some basic AI concepts, strategies and terminology, as well as the workflow of ML and data science projects.
Excel Skills for Business
Offered by: Macquarie University
Knowing Excel is key if you want to become a skilled data analyst or data scientists. (Read Job Role: Data Analyst.)
This course will teach you a lot of useful advanced functions needed to format and manipulate data, perform advanced calculi, automate processes and use lookup functions.
You will learn how to analyze data and present it in a clear way by creating easily understandable charts, tables, and spreadsheets. In addition, at the end of this course you will be a master at spotting errors, prevent mistakes, and validate existing data.
The Science of Well-Being
Last but not least, before taking any advanced technology course, why don’t you take a course on how to be a better, more productive person? Self-isolation may exert a heavy toll on our mental health, and this course is designed to teach you productive habits, focus on your well-being and debunk all myths and misconceptions about happiness in general.
A great course to prepare yourself to successfully take other courses in a more efficient way!
Final Thoughts
Take a breath and trust that a brighter future lies ahead of us. Taking this opportunity to learn new skills and broaden your horizons is a smart choice that will pave your career after the dust has settled.
Practice self care and take one of these online courses to become even more productive and skilled than you may not have realized.
