Study the Future: Beuth University Works with AWS Educate to Create Big Data Course

Study the Future: this is the motto of the Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, Germany. With a wide range of forward-looking degree courses and a staff of highly qualified specialists, Beuth University provides students with the best possible prospects for their professional future.

One course that sets students up for success post-graduation is their new big data course: Einführung in Data-Analytics & Big-Data Praxis (Introduction to Data Analytics and Big Data Practice).

The course was designed and led by Alwin Haensel, the founder and managing director of Haensel AMS GmbH, a data analytics company. As a part-time lecturer in the mathematics department at Beuth University, Haensel worked with AWS Educate to create a new big data course for the 2017 summer semester, which provides hands-on big data and cloud training for students.

Through AWS Educate, each student in the course received an AWS account to gain experience with AWS. Over the 14 weeks of the semester, 15 students attended the elective course for four hours per week to collect, store, process, analyze, and visualize big data on the cloud. The students learned to use AWS services including, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Each week, students would also set up and work with a different big data tool, such as: setting up a Spark or Hadoop cluster from scratch; using Hive to analyze datasets; setting up and testing database systems such as ElasticSearch, Cassandra or Neo4J; or building machine learning Tools with SparkML.

“My goal with this course was to provide students with practical knowledge of what will be required at a future job in the data analytics and data science area. Oftentimes, curriculum can be too theoretical, and students lack the practical knowledge and hands-on experience with big data and cloud tools,” said Haensel. “AWS is a great environment and very straightforward to use, so it was an easy setup, leaving us to concentrate on the tools. Plus, the students gained experience with a cloud environment which they will see in their professional career.”

With this semester’s success and the collaboration with AWS Educate, the university is looking to add cloud computing into more of their curriculum.

Learn more about how you can receive access to AWS technology, open source content for courses, training resources, and a community of cloud evangelists with AWS Educate. Bring the cloud to your classroom today.