A tale of two courses: Blockchain vs Ethics

As part of my continuing professional development I have taken two courses. They are similar in terms of backer and effort required. Hopefuly they will help me to prepare for 2018!

 The first is an intro to Ethics and Law related to analytics and AI applications. This provided by Microsoft on the edX platform. This followed a common format of:
  • a short video, 
  • linked content to read, 
  • labs to explore the subject, and finally 
  • quizzes to check progress. 

 The content was still fresh with the course first run in April 2017. This meant it was topical with GDPR law as well as FCC rulings in the USA. If you are in IT and interested in Ethics, then I can recommend learning from an ethicist. There is no real need to come up with your own moral framework, since there is over 2000 years of open research. Having the two experts from different domains present their viewpoints and way of working was a nice escape from the technologist bubble.

 The second was actually a pair of courses:
I am still finishing off the labs for foundation developer. The two courses are very similar though. The format is almost identical to the Microsoft course. It is hosted on IBM's developerWorks platform. The main difference is that the video segments were not as slick. It looks like a developer livestream that has been re-purposed. The learning outcomes might be better, as it gives hands on experience on using a new tool. This is based on the assumption most people have already used Excel, which is used in the Ethics course labs.

 This course threw shade on bitcoin, which is what most of us probably think of when we hear blockchain. It was great for bringing it back to what blockchain is ... essentially "just" a modern ledger. At the start they even made it clear where it wouldn't be appropriate tech, and to use a normal distributed DB instead.

Summary

So, a quick head-to-head if you are interested in either of these courses:
Microsoft: DAT249x Ethics and Law in Analytics and AI  blockchain
Useful prior knowledge Excel is used for data analysis, but any stats package could be used. This isn't a very technical course. Some familiarity with JavaScript and JSON is useful for essentials, but the focus is more on a business understanding. APIs, JavaScript and docker for foundation developer as this is a more hands-on technical course for developers.
What I learned
  • Foundational abilities in applying ethical and legal frameworks for the data profession
  • Practical approaches to data and analytics problems, including Big Data and Data Science and AI
  • Applied data methods for ethical and legal work in Analytics and AI

  • An understanding of Blockchain principles and practices and how they can be applied within a business environment. 
  • I have an understanding of Blockchain and distributed ledger systems, the important concepts and key use cases of Blockchain and how assets can be transferred in a Blockchain network.
  • Successful completion of the associated practical lab demonstrating the ability to create a working chaincode and deploy it to a blockchain network
  • Experience of using Hyperledger Composer Playground to create and test a model prior to deployment
Certificate available Yes, for a fee: Hosted in the edX plarform Yes, for a fee: Badges hosted in third party YourAcclain


My learning plan for 2018 is currently:

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