Data Engineering & Big Data Basics
Signature Course No. 151 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Data Engineering & Big Data Basics course, in the Personal Effectiveness & Well-Being category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
This is the course for the people who fund and use data systems — for executives and sponsors who approve data budgets and are judged by the numbers those systems produce — for operations managers whose reports arrive late, thin, or quietly wrong — for finance partners asked to sign off storage, compute, and platform renewals — and for analysts and report builders who need to explain, in business language, why a number moved.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — How Data Moves, Lands, and Earns Trust — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Sponsor's Brief; then, Module 2 — Running, Governing, and Judging the System — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Keep-Funding Review.
You finish by proving the whole course — in The Sponsor's Brief and in The Keep-Funding Review. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free. Defending a budget or challenging a report are spoken acts, and this course lets you practice them that way.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
This course teaches the data journey for the people who pay for it. You will not find code here, and you will not be taught to write any — that is not the job. You will learn to read the journey end to end: where data comes from, how it moves, where it lands, how its definitions are modeled, how its quality is checked, what it costs, and who governs it. Data platforms change names, prices, and packaging every year; the durable ideas underneath them — sources, movement, storage, transformation, quality, cost, governance — do not, so the course teaches those durable ideas in generic terms. Every figure that depends on a current product or price is presented as an explicit illustrative assumption you can replace with your own quote, and the running company's numbers recompute from their stated inputs, so you can check each one yourself.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a sponsor's brief a board could fund, and a keep-funding review a board could act on — written to be used on the real job, not just filed in the course.
This is the one hundred and fifty-first course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the picture itself. The report is the last step, not the system — judge the journey and the report explains itself. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Sponsor's Brief for Module 1 and The Keep-Funding Review for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Every modern business runs on data it did not create in one place. Orders begin on shop tills and websites, deliveries on scanners, prices and products in master files, staff and suppliers in systems nobody calls “data” at all. Between those beginnings and the report a leader reads, the data is moved, housed, reshaped, checked, combined, and priced — a supply chain for numbers, built by engineers and paid for by people who rarely see it. When the numbers are late, thin, or quietly wrong, the failure is almost never in the last report; it is somewhere along that journey, earlier and quieter, where a sponsor's question would have caught it.
This course makes that hidden system visible to the people who pay for it and are judged by it. You will not write code, and you will not need to. You will learn to read the journey end to end — sources, storage, models, quality, cost, governance — in the business terms you already use, so that every data proposal, every platform budget, and every confident assurance can be met with the questions that matter, in the order they matter. The journey is judged as one system: a weakness anywhere is a weakness in the number at the end.
Trust is a property of the system, not a feeling about the team. A sponsor who cannot tell a storage decision from a freshness decision will approve the wrong budget with complete confidence — so the course keeps asking, at every stage, what the evidence is and who owns it. When you finish, you should be able to sit across from any supplier, any internal team, and any consultant, and ask the questions that do not depend on whose logo is on the slide.
What you will learn
- Explain where business data comes from and how pipelines move and transform it
- Distinguish lakes, warehouses, batch, and streaming — and state what each choice costs and buys
- Read a warehouse model and judge whether its definitions match the business's definitions
- Diagnose data quality, identity, and double-counting problems in business terms
- Estimate how volume, retention, and freshness drive data cost — and challenge a cost you cannot trace
- Specify a data need so that "done" can be tested, and judge delivery against that specification
- Govern data well: ownership, access, privacy, retention, service levels, and the evidence that a system deserves continued funding
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Data Engineering & Big Data Basics, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Sponsor’s Brief and The Keep-Funding Review
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the people who fund and use data systems
Data Engineering & Big Data Basics is for executives and sponsors who fund data platforms, warehouses, and analytics work and must judge proposals, budgets, and results without an engineering background — for operations managers whose decisions run on reports they did not build and cannot currently interrogate — for finance partners asked to approve storage, compute, and platform spend they cannot yet decompose,
and for analysts and report builders who need the concepts underneath their tools — sources, keys, definitions, quality — in business language they can carry into a room.
This is a Personal Effectiveness & Well-Being course. It assumes no programming experience and no prior engineering study. If you can read a report and question a budget, you have everything this course requires to start.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Sponsor's Brief
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Data Engineering & Big Data Basics is Signature Course No. 151. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.