Cloudera is seeking to bridge the Big Data knowledge gap – and ensure that the market sustains its momentum for years to come – through education. The Hadoop distributor has joined forces with Udacity, a Mountain View, California-based provider of massive open online courses (MOOCs,) to equip tech-savvy students with the know-how to uncover patterns in vast data sets and turn information into business insight.

Cloudera and Udacity have put together a three-lesson course called Introduction to Hadoop and MapReduce, which covers the basics of Hadoop and running MapReduce jobs on HDFS. The companies plan to compose an entire curriculum on using open source analytics tools, enabling students to learn at their own pace and pick up the fundamentals needed for Cloudera’s professional training and certification programs.

Mike Olson, the chief strategy officer and chairman of Cloudera, stated that “our partnership with Udacity helps us get there, since we’re able to co-develop a curriculum based on the core skills we know enterprises require, make it user-centric and open, and place it in a highly curatorial context of education resources specifically for mid-career technology professionals looking to expand their capabilities.”

The Udacity partnership marks the latest milestone for Cloudera’s broad education initiative. The company previously announced Cloudera Academic Partnership, a global program designed to help universities offer Big Data courses for engineering and analytics students. CAP launched with a number of partners, including the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, California State University, Los Angeles and San Jose State University. Other notable participants include Auburn University in Alabama, Indiana’s Purdue University, Technische Universität Berlin and The University of Stavanger in Norway.

While Cloudera is busy democratizing data science, Cerego is helping healthcare students maximize the efficiency of their learning. The memory management startup recently teamed up with Elsevier to deliver a personalized studying solution for tomorrow’s doctors and nurses.