Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I take a Udacity.com online course and find good, bad, and ugly.

I recently took an online course from udacity.com. As the post title suggests, I found…

The Good: I was excited about the nanodegree program that udacity—one of the big players in MOOC—was about to offer. Companies were creating courses to teach what they wanted new hires to know the day the walked on the job.

Great! Something practical and practice-able. Take someone who works at Adobe (one provider) and let them tell you, “This is what I wish I knew when I was hired.”

The Bad: I wanted to work through the Data Analyst nanodegree. I often see job openings for data analyst, data scientist, data systems engineer, etc. and I wanted to apply for those.

The bad was that the first course in the series is Intro to Computer Science. This isn’t a bad course in itself, but it fits badly into the idea espoused for the nanodegree. This isn’t a course created and led by someone in industry. It is a college course. As a freshman college course, it is fine, but not for real jobs.

The course has video segments followed by quizzes. There are about a dozen items in a lesson, and seven lessons in the course. Thankfully, the longest video segment is five minutes. I grew weary of the hand writing on the white board or smartboard or whatever they use. I could read the writing, but please, just show powerpoint fonts. And the drawings—please, show something drawn with software so the circles are round, the rectangles have 90-degree corners, and the straight lines are straight.

The lessons build on one another as you build a web crawler.

The course is an introduction to Python programming with some web concepts and general ideas tossed in.

It seems that college computer science professors haven’t changed much in 35 years. They still love little questions where they can say, “Aha, tricked you. You always have to allow for the case where there may be a space after the comma when preceded by two spaces and a period in collusion with a semi-colon…” Who cares?

The word that kept coming to mind regarding the course was tedious. Then again, I’m old and don’t have time for games and minding commas and periods and spaces and all that.

The Ugly: I completed the course in ten days. Udacity expects the typical student to be working a full-time job and spending about an hour a day on the course. They estimate the time to complete the course at seven weeks. I was unemployed and worked hard at finishing quickly.

My motivation for working so hard and fast was that I had two weeks free. I wanted to finish before my two weeks were done so I wouldn’t have to pay the $150/month fee for this class.

I submitted my Final Project and was told that I had to pay a one-month fee to get a certificate for the course. Earlier in the course I had asked a Udacity coach about receiving credit for the course. I was told that all I had to do was complete the Final Project. So much for that. I never received credit for the ten days of hard work.

The Summary: Udacity does a good job of presenting material. They have good videos and a nice way to submit computer programs in their browser to test the code.  You could always argue that Python is a bad language for teaching, but you have to pick something and, even though I have yet to see a job advertised for a Python programmer, well, you know.

I am still upset about not receiving a certificate for my work. I guess I should have read the 11-page Terms of Agreement to find the sentence tucked at the end of a paragraph near the end of page 8. Then again, “You always have to allow for the case where there may be a space after the comma when preceded by two spaces and a period in collusion with a semi-colon…”