Distance Learning | News

NYU Targets Fortune 500 Company Employees in New Emerging Technology Course

• By Michael Hart
• 09/08/14

Beginning in January, New York University will offer a year-long graduate-level program targeting the employees of major technology-driven companies who need to stay up to speed on the emerging issues that affect them.

The online courses will focus on upgrading employee skills in the areas of cybersecurity, mobility and big data analysis.

Taught in three trimesters over a year, upon completion the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering will grant graduates a certificate and nine credits that can be applied to a qualified master's degree program.

Robert Ubell, vice dean of the school's online learning unit, said the impetus for the online courses came from  discussions with executives at Fortune 500 companies who told the school about the skills its employees were lacking.

"We uncovered these three hot spots where companies are being pressed to find first-class solutions," Ubell said. "This addition to our virtual curriculum responds to the evolving needs of global companies." 

The "Mobile Security" course will home in on solutions to threats to mobile devices, networks and services, acknowledging the facts that mobile devices now outnumber computers worldwide and that smartphones and tablets can be enticing targets for criminal activity.

"Big Data Analysis" will offer some insights into the storage, organization and processing of data on the scale now available to companies that go beyond the capabilities of what once were conventional information technologies. The course will review state-of-the-art analytics and applications that can help companies both gather information on big data platforms and analyze it.

Finally, "Cloud Computing: Concepts and Practice" will help students understand how to use the cloud, write cloud applications and build their own private clouds. It will give them insight into both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technologies.

Since this past January, the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering has offered master's degree programs in, among other things, cybersecurity, electrical engineering, bioinformatics and organizational behavior. That is when the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, the NYU School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute merged and began offering courses on its downtown Brooklyn campus as well as online.