Microsoft Professional Degree in Data Science
There's an interesting new offering where Microsoft has partnered with edX to package courses into a new offering: A Microsoft Professional Degree Program.
The first instance of these I have seen is in Data Science, but I can only imagine there will be additional ones to follow soon:
https://academy.microsoft.com/en-US/professional-degree/data-science/
This was just announced and is still in beta, but I think this will be a great way to identify coursework which, taken together, builds competency in a specific area. It's also really nice to see there's some flexibility -- for the Data Science courses there's a couple of the requirements which offer alternatives, like an Intro to R course or an intro to Python which could each meet the objective.
Since I've already worked through one of the 10 required courses, I might now be inspired to work through the others so I'll blog about that experience. I expect it will be a lot like the great experience I had with the Power BI course: A great chance to learn a topic, get hands-on experience and do it on my own schedule from anywhere with an internet connection. There is a cost for the verified certificates, but at $29 to $99 a course, that's still a reasonable cost if this content helps you build your professional skills.