After 3 month of back to (online) school I received my Stanford Machine Learning Course Certificate.
I haven’t been back to school for many many years and some of the math (linear algebra and calculus) needed a serious refresher.
This course gives you a great overview of the field of machine learning and is very hands on.
I loved the character recognition exercise where a neural network was employed. Overall this course gives you a great introduction into machine learning with Andrew Ng who is an accomplished instructor.
Expect to spend about 4-8 hours or more a week on this course, especially if you need to read up on some of the math or are not familiar with Octave (open source MathLab equivalent).
The course description is available at:
http://online.stanford.edu/course/machine-learning