Dear Spark Devs, Ameet Talwalkar, Brian Clapper, and I are teaching several large free MOOCs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course> this year on Apache Spark and we are looking for participants from the community who would like to help by being Teaching Assistants for the courses. I am a Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley in the AMPLab <https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/>, Ameet is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at UCLA , and Brian is the Databricks Senior Instructor and Application Engineer with more than 32 years of development experience.
Being a TA is a great opportunity to interact with a wide audience of Spark enthusiasts, and TAs will be formally listed as part of the course staff on the course website. My course <https://www.edx.org/course/v2/introduction-big-data-apache-spark-uc-berkeleyx-cs100-1x> is an introduction to big data analysis using Spark, and Ameet’s course <https://www.edx.org/course/scalable-machine-learning-uc-berkeleyx-cs190-1x> is about using Spark for Distributed Machine Learning applications. We are also developing three more courses: an introductory Spark course, an advanced Machine Learning course, and an advanced Spark course. The courses will be taught in Python. Last year’s offering of my course enrolled over 76,000 students with a 29% engagement rate and 11.2% completion rate, and the course was rated by students on Class Central <https://www.class-central.com/report/best-free-online-courses-2015/> in the top-ten of all MOOCs offered last year. Last year’s offering of Ameet’s course enrolled over 56,000 students with a 29% engagement rate and 14.5% completion rate. We're looking for volunteer Teaching Assistants (TAs) with at least two of the following skills: basic Python Spark programming and debugging experience, basic ML knowledge, and basic operations skills (writing and using scripts, helping with username/password issues, etc.). We are looking for a time-commitment of roughly 10-20 hours per week beginning in March and ending November. The team will be distributed and we’re flexible about start and end dates and specific working hours. We can offer a stipend. Please contact us (Anthony a...@berkeley.edu and cc Ameet am...@cs.ucla.edu and Brian Clapper b...@databricks.com) if you are interested in working with us. Thanks, Anthony, Ameet, and Brian