Joining a Cohort

The general flow is the same regardless of which course you take. The course-specific links (which repo, which Slack channel, which YouTube playlist) are on each course’s getting-started page.

Registration

  • Register on the course landing page on datatalks.club. Free, stays open the whole cohort.
  • Registration only signs you up for cohort updates by email. It does not create your platform account.
  • You receive an email with the cohort schedule when the cohort kicks off. Far-away cohorts: the email arrives closer to the start date.

Course platform account

The course management platform is a separate account, used to submit homework, track your score, see deadlines, and submit your project. Sign up with any email - it does not have to match the email you used to register for cohort updates.

For the platform UI, see Course Management Platform.

Course materials

  • All course materials live in a public GitHub repository (one per course).
  • Star the repo so you can find it later.
  • Module folders contain the lectures, code, and reading.
  • The cohorts/<year>/ folder holds the active cohort’s homework and deadlines.
  • Pre-recorded lectures live on the DataTalks.Club YouTube channel - one playlist per course.

Slack and Telegram

  • Join the DataTalks.Club Slack workspace.
  • Find the course-specific channel (#course-data-engineering, #course-ml-zoomcamp, etc.). See the Slack guide for the full list.
  • Subscribe to the course’s Telegram channel for announcements (recommended). Telegram is one-way, but it is the most reliable place to catch important updates because Slack gets noisy.

Newsletter

The DataTalks.Club newsletter goes out every Monday with course announcements and community updates. Everyone who signs up for a cohort is automatically subscribed. If you are not receiving the newsletter, you have probably unsubscribed at some point - re-subscribe via the newsletter page.

Next step

For the course-specific bootstrap (which exact repo, channel, Telegram, and environment setup), see your course’s getting-started page:

If the cohort has already started, see Joining Mid-Cohort. You do not need to attend live sessions to be in the live cohort - submitting homework on time is what matters.