Ok I know a lot of people are so into big data analytics now, myself included. A lot of corporations want to jump into the bandwagon to adopt the more sophisticated data analytics techniques to help solve their business problems.
Students, practitioners are increasingly looking for short/weekend courses, online and offline for them to learn about data analytics specifically on predictive analytics. For the online courses, I would recommend Udacity, EdEx and Coursera.
However, I would also like to recommend Kaggle, a platform for predictive modelling and analytics. They host all kinds of datasets for you to explore and wrangle. After taking part in MIT’s Analytics Lab last Fall, I seriously encourage those who are interested in this space, to get dirty with actual big data. Hands-on application is always the best form of learning. You will also have the opportunity to understand the challenges underlying big data analytics.
Dayana Omar 