Wednesday 16 October 2013

All good things come to an end

The MOOC ended last week with Class 5. It will remain open until the end of Sunday, 20 Oct (all time zones). Statements of Completion will be emailed once the course closes. The course material will remain available up indefinitely at:
 

under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC-BY 3.0) license. Use it however you like! We've also added the music, as MP3 files, to the course material.

We are planning to re-run Data Mining with Weka early next year (probably March). And your enthusiastic feedback has encouraged us to think about a more advanced version. But it does depend on support from Waikato University, and we are waiting until this course is over before commencing that conversation.
 
A survey about the course is available at:
 
 
Please fill it in! The response rate, and your feedback, as well as the course completion rate, will no doubt influence our ability to run future courses.
 
We have very much enjoyed giving this MOOC. And we have learned a lot in the process! We are preparing a report on the experience and will post a draft to WekaMOOC-announce, in case you're interested.
 
You can read more about Waikato's machine learning research group at:
 
 
Our publications are listed under the Publications tab
 
In the good old days, Weka was an externally funded research project. But that ended long ago. Both Weka and this MOOC are supported entirely by our Department and University. If you think these efforts are worthwhile and would like to support them financially, that would be lovely! Please do so here:
 
 
All donations are directed to research: no administrative charges are incurred.
 
Finally, how about coming to Waikato to study? Our Department's web site at
 
 
has links to our research groups, and to graduate student information (MSc and PhD).
 
Excuse the advertising :-). Hope you had fun with the MOOC. Don't forget the survey. See you next time!
 
cheers
 
Ian

Monday 7 October 2013

Class 5 is now available

The lessons for Class 5, the last in our course, are now available on the course website:

        https://weka.waikato.ac.nz/

Class 5 broadens out to consider some more general issues. It's a short week, with just four topics: 
  • 5.1: The data mining process
  • 5.2: Pitfalls and pratfalls
  • 5.3: Data mining and ethics
  • 5.4: Summary
 
The post-course assessment opens on Wed Oct 9. Everything will remain open for one further week, until Sunday Oct 20, when the course will be closed.
 
We will also ask you to complete a survey for your opinions of the MOOC. 
 
We will probably run the course again, perhaps in late summer -- I mean NZ summer! -- maybe in March 2014. And we are contemplating a follow-up MOOC that covers topics we couldn't fit into this course. But our ability to continue with MOOCs will depend on the success of this one, and the number of people who complete it successfully will be a key metric. Thus I once again urge you to do the assessments for my sake, if not your own :-)

Please keep up the help on the course forum -- we greatly value your assistance.
We'll soon put out a short (optional) video to discuss a few issues that have arisen in Class 4.

cheers, and enjoy the remainder of the course!
Ian