Online MSc Computer Science with Data Analytics at University of York

MSc can better equip students for higher studies and it also prepares students for the job market.
One year intro course to IT does not prepare anyone for the job market, that's just silly nonsense. There are not "higher studies" after Masters. Ph.D is not a taught course.

By your logic, everybody should just get someone from their neighborhood to teach programming and pay them 60$. This would be cheaper and even better than Udacity
Udacity is the best thing on the market when it comes to Data Science and ML. If you want to spend money and you think that you need a piece of paper as an evidence then nailing the Deep Learning and Machine Learning Engineer course is the way to go. It is a really difficult course and it is know for it. If you need something to get you to an interview, this will do it, MSc wont. Also, you get a lots of support and access to people way better qualified and experienced to guide you than a random part time TA with zero industry experience.

edX and Coursera are free if you do not need the paper in your hand (and you usually don't).

From my experience I can tell that people who helped themselves toward ML do way better then people with a degree in ML. I've done the same. It's a common practice in the industry to hire people that got no degrees but happen to have a decent github, score on kaggle have a relevant blog, etc.

Had a quick look at that just now and it sounds awesome, best of luck!

That is nice. Good luck.

Had a quick look at that just now and it sounds awesome, best of luck!

How many hours of study per week does this course require to get top marks? Just wondering how one would manage a job whilst doing this. Just to add, I'm a total beginner.

MSc can better equip students for higher studies and it also prepares students for the job market.
One year intro course to IT does not prepare anyone for the job market, that's just silly nonsense. There are not "higher studies" after Masters. Ph.D is not a taught course.

By your logic, everybody should just get someone from their neighborhood to teach programming and pay them 60$. This would be cheaper and even better than Udacity
Udacity is the best thing on the market when it comes to Data Science and ML. If you want to spend money and you think that you need a piece of paper as an evidence then nailing the Deep Learning and Machine Learning Engineer course is the way to go. It is a really difficult course and it is know for it. If you need something to get you to an interview, this will do it, MSc wont. Also, you get a lots of support and access to people way better qualified and experienced to guide you than a random part time TA with zero industry experience.

edX and Coursera are free if you do not need the paper in your hand (and you usually don't).

From my experience I can tell that people who helped themselves toward ML do way better then people with a degree in ML. I've done the same. It's a common practice in the industry to hire people that got no degrees but happen to have a decent github, score on kaggle have a relevant blog, etc.

Ah thanks so much it does seem doable! I'm not in a job yet but I am thinking of 9-5. Another question: how much of the course is data analytics? Since that is what I am mainly interested in.

As far as I can see there are only two modules that cover data analytics, those two modules being Data-mining and text analysis and also the big data module. Some will say the AI and machine learning module is also data analytics, this is true but it is often regarded as a separate but related subject imo.

MSc can better equip students for higher studies and it also prepares students for the job market.
One year intro course to IT does not prepare anyone for the job market, that's just silly nonsense. There are not "higher studies" after Masters. Ph.D is not a taught course.

By your logic, everybody should just get someone from their neighborhood to teach programming and pay them 60$. This would be cheaper and even better than Udacity
Udacity is the best thing on the market when it comes to Data Science and ML. If you want to spend money and you think that you need a piece of paper as an evidence then nailing the Deep Learning and Machine Learning Engineer course is the way to go. It is a really difficult course and it is know for it. If you need something to get you to an interview, this will do it, MSc wont. Also, you get a lots of support and access to people way better qualified and experienced to guide you than a random part time TA with zero industry experience.

edX and Coursera are free if you do not need the paper in your hand (and you usually don't).

From my experience I can tell that people who helped themselves toward ML do way better then people with a degree in ML. I've done the same. It's a common practice in the industry to hire people that got no degrees but happen to have a decent github, score on kaggle have a relevant blog, etc.

I understand your concerns, but I am already working on data a little at my workplace. I have already taken some basic courses on coursera and edx. I am planning to combine this MSc with udemy to get better skills because 1 or 2 udemy courses cant make you complete data analyst. That is what I think. With MSc, there are deadlines and problem sets that I believe can keep me motivated. There are dedicated discussion forums and connection with lecturers as well. Udemy courses, I know I might not even complete them because there is no pressure, as at my workplace I am already able to handle the tasks with my current skill level. So, even if I somehow slow down on udemy course, MSc program would hopefully keep me on track and I think York's outline is good.

Seems like you are motivated to only defend your point. I'm sorry to tell you that a PhD can actually get you very far in the industry when it comes to AI and ML. Tech giants are paying BIG MONEY to hire AI academics as you can read in this report from The Guardian. Look at the LinkedIn profiles below, all had done their PhDs in CS at York and now they are doing ML at Facebook and Amazon in San Francisco!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pandrews/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-butler-phd-347b9173/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/quarteroni/

The reason why academics are being bought for lots of money is because the are literally the only people available (for now). ML is a new domain. It has nothing to do with MSc and Ph.D giving any advantage, this is basic market mechanics. This was the same around the year 2000 with WWW, the only people who knew how to make a decent website were academics so lots of web designers and programmers had multiple Ph.Ds and professorships, that does not mean that Ph.D makes you a better eShop builder, they just were the only thing around.
If you start Ph.D now in 4 years you will be worse off than someone with 4 years of work experience and you get destroyed by people who spend their evenings on udacity or udemy. Becaus,e when there was the WWW "rush". Academia had the monopoly on education, now they are just expensive and obsolete.

The reason why academics are being bought for lots of money is because the are literally the only people available (for now). ML is a new domain. It has nothing to do with MSc and Ph.D giving any advantage, this is basic market mechanics. This was the same around the year 2000 with WWW, the only people who knew how to make a decent website were academics so lots of web designers and programmers had multiple Ph.Ds and professorships, that does not mean that Ph.D makes you a better eShop builder, they just were the only thing around.
If you start Ph.D now in 4 years you will be worse off than someone with 4 years of work experience and you get destroyed by people who spend their evenings on udacity or udemy. Becaus,e when there was the WWW "rush". Academia had the monopoly on education, now they are just expensive and obsolete.

I think you're overstating the benefit of MOOCs just a tad if you think that someone who gets a job now, and 4 years experience doing mostly data cleaning and data analysis, let's be honest, will be better off when applying to positions such as ML researcher than someone with a PhD and relevant research experience/publications/citations etc.

Data science/ML are hot fields right now, and the industry is attracting swarms of people who have now completed the courses you mentioned, such as nanodegrees. So, who then stands out in the crowd for top positions in this field? Someone who paid £60 for an online course or someone who did good, recognised research?

The courses you mentioned are absolutely fantastic by the way and there's no doubt you can get a good job in this area as a result of completing them, and showcasing well developed projects to employers. But trying to validate your own choices by coming to this forum and arguing that these courses are more useful than a a MSc/PhD, that's a bit much.

MSc wont help you to stand out unless it is some sort of crazy specialist topup from Cranfiled or something you need to get chartered. Otherwise it is just a very expensive and introductory short course. If you have done something like a BA in History and hope that one year intro to CS is going to save your ass then you are really setting up yourself for a a major disappointment.

There is not a single Uni ML course that would teach you anything relevant. Reality of the job market is that companies train their own staff. We do that for 5 years now. Uni Degrees wont tell you much about a candidate, graduates are all like clones, completely interchangeable. I have a folder with about 2500 CVs from failed candidates that did not made it to the interview. It's not like they are bad or anything but there is no way of differentiating between them. They are all about 23 years old, random college degree, some got masters some did not, zero experience in anything, no hobbies apart of "music, travelling, socialising".

I am looking for some sort of evidence that you know what you are doing, that you've done something own your own, something hard, for example that you pushed trough a capstone project in the Self Driving Car Engineer course. Something that tells me that you wont bail out after 3 months. Trainees get "just" 27k in their first year but the actual cost of a trainee is about 65k.

Two weeks ago we had a candidate here that build a turret that shoots ice cubes at foxes trying to make it into their garbage, it can tell apart foxes from dogs. I made him to bring it in for his interview, just to make sure that it is real.

Tbh though an MSc dissertation supposed to demonstrate this exact skill. You make something original and use it as evidence that you really understand your subject.

Tried to read few dissertations from people in conversion courses It's usually a very superficial and generic gibberish nobody is ever going to read. I spend 20 seconds on your CV, the idea that I am going to spend next 5 hours by going trough your dissertation is funny.