Paid vs Free Data Engineering courses?

News & discussion on Data Engineering topics, including but not limited to: data pipelines, databases, data formats, storage, data modeling, data governance, cleansing, NoSQL, distributed systems, streaming, batch, Big Data, and workflow engines. Hello! The company I work at allows for $5000 annual education stipend. Currently I am a data scientist that works mostly on Analytics — I use SQL 95% of the time, and I can hack my way around Pandas and R with googling (used them both in the past). I would like to get more technical and would transition into Data Engineering — I wanted to sign up for a Data Engineering course to learn key softwares and tools that DE teams look for. I’ve seen several free camps like Zoomcamp and paid courses by MIT — since I’lll get the course reimbursed, can anyone recommend a good option for a DS trying to switch to DE? I’m having a hard time understanding what a paid course will offer over a free one, but I want to make sure I select the highest quality course since budget is no issue. Edit: what works great for me is bigger project style structures. I liked The Odin Project for Web Dev… not a fan of purely video lectures with quizzes like most Coursera courses.