Learn Google Cloud Computing with Free Courses for Duke Students and Staff

Duke students, faculty and staff can now get free courses on using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) through the Coursera for Duke online learning program. The courses were created by Google, and teach learners the fundamentals of using Google’s cloud computing suite for big data analytics, machine learning, application development, Cloud Infrastructure and more.

Five introductory courses are now available in the Coursera for Duke catalog:

How Google does Machine Learning: This course is first of a five-course Specialization, which includes hands-on labs, will take you from a strategic overview of why machine learning matters to practical skills in building real-world, accurate ML models.

Exploring ​and ​Preparing ​your ​Data with BigQuery: This is the first of a four-course specialization. Learn to derive insights through data analysis and visualization. The courses feature interactive scenarios where participants explore, mine, load, visualize, and extract insights from diverse BigQuery datasets.

Google Cloud Platform: Big Data and Machine Learning Fundamentals: This course is the first of a five-course Specialization and is designed for data professionals who are responsible for designing, building, analyzing, and optimizing big data solutions.

Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure: This course is the first of a six-course Specialization and is designed for professionals who implement, deploy, migrate, and maintain applications in the cloud.

Getting Started with Google Kubernetes Engine: This one-week, accelerated course equips learners to containerize workloads in Docker containers, deploy them to Kubernetes clusters provided by Google Kubernetes Engine, and scale those workloads to handle increased traffic.

Google Cloud team is also offering Qwiklabs credits. Qwiklabs is a GCP training tool, with 150+ labs to help you learn about Google Cloud Platform through scenario-based use cases. Each lab covers skills and tools you’ll use when working with Google Cloud Platform, from the basics of spinning up a virtual machine to building advanced predictive ML models. Complete Quests to earn badges, each one a credential you can add to your resume. Click here to select a lab, and you’ll get 100 Qwiklabs credits, good towards any lab in the catalog (and enough to complete a Quest or two, free of charge). You’ll need to create a Qwiklabs account if you don’t have one already. Hurry, this link expires October 1!

The free Training resources are part of recent efforts by Google to make its powerful cloud computing infrastructure available to universities. In 2016, Google started offering Google Cloud Platform Education Grants for computer science faculty and students. In April, the company announced a new Google Cloud Platform research credit program for researchers to power scientific workloads.

Bram Brout, Google’s Director of Education, wrote in 2016:

We believe that universities can benefit from Google Cloud Platform in three areas: research, infrastructure and teaching. In research, GCP big data and machine learning tools can power experiments and analyses that weren’t even possible just a year ago. GCP frees academic IT organizations from the overhead of managing infrastructure, provisioning servers and configuring networks, and in teaching we enable professors to teach modern cloud computing subjects on Google Cloud Platform.

At Duke, Google Cloud Platform is currently used by engineering students, sociology graduate students and entrepreneurs.

Learners can sign up and take the courses at any time, at their own pace. To enroll, visit Coursera for Duke and search for “Google Cloud.”

For questions about using Google Cloud courses through Coursera for Duke, contact online@duke.edu.