Help us teach Spark and grow the Spark community

["Anthony D. Joseph" <ad...@eecs.berkeley.edu>]

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 adj@berkeley.edu and cc Ameet ameet@cs.ucla.edu
and Brian Clapper bmc@databricks.com) if you are interested in working with
us.

Thanks,

Anthony, Ameet, and Brian