RMOTR

I found particularly interesting how all lessons and classes were detailed thought and talked about specific topics or practices that is not easy to find in books or surfing Internet. That's what I expected to get from an instructor-lead course like this. Everything else can be found online.

My local timezone didn't match very well with class times, but that's actually my personal issue. Sometimes it was hard for me to attend classes on time, or stay awake during the whole class time.

I signed up for the web development track and they immediately failed to meet even the most basic assumptions.  Their platform appears to be about average but it was so buggy that I was submitting tickets several times a day trying to get them to fix it.  From there it's worse because they don't respond in a timely fashion.  Additionally, their "unlimited mentor support" really means a couple nights a week and if you're lucky you might get help on a weekend.  

I'm a very experienced developer in other languages and have a little experience in python.  

I give them a flat F for failing to think this through.  It very much feels like something they're running out of their basement to make some side cash.     

Well I actually didn't get the chance to try their courses because they failed to attend our very first session!
I was scheduled for an interview regarding their Data Science course, and they even sent me 2 reminders on the day of the interview, then guess what, RMOTR interviewer didn't show up?!
I spent the next 30 mins hoping someone will show up, I even checked the time and date again just to make sure I didn't miss anything.
I also used their live chatting service, no response there as well!
A horoble experience without ever attending a single session!

After taking the introduction to python course, I'm not sure that the other reviewers took the same course I did. Because of the scheduled course times and promises of adding projects to our github profiles, I assumed this was a well-structured course with clear goals and expectations, but this course felt disorganized and disjointed. The syllabus is a bulleted list with no description of lessons or assignments, no dates. The lectures left me feeling unprepared for the assignments, and the lectures were very short compared to what I expected (often ending quite early). I expected 4 hours of lecture material prepared each week, but at least two of those hours were for working on assigments (as individuals or groups). Working in groups was extremely inconvenient, and I would have preferred about triple the amount of individual assignments during the first 3-4 weeks of the course, and then work on larger projects as a group (or individual, if preferred) during the last couple weeks once we all got used to working with github and the IDE, and comfortable with the overall flow of the course.

There was a distinct lack of awareness or interest in accessibility: transcripts are not provided for the lectures (I asked), and there is a heavy reliance on Google hangouts for voice and video communication. The teacher hopped around a lot when sharing his screen, flipflopping between tabs and windows, which made it very difficult to follow. He was very receptive when I brought it up to him, but the fact that I even had to bring it up (and the fact that providing transcripts is not something they will do) told me a lot. A RMOTR employee in the slack chat also used disabled slurs and did not respond when I messaged them privately.

The slides are provided for the lectures, but they are not super helpful, and they are white text on a blue background, and therefore not easily printable or useful for note-taking.

The course was advertised as a good introduction for anyone who wants to learn Python, and listed Codecademy's Python course as a good starting point and prerequesite. Other than Codecademy, I have very little coding experience, and felt completely unprepared for this course. The instructor and mentors kept saying "it'll all make sense soon" and I kept holding out hoping the next lesson would be "the one" where they tied it all together, but it never happened, and eventually 6 weeks passed.

In hindsight, I wish I'd requested a refund.

Out of desperate frustration around week 4, I searched for ways to supplement this course and to do what I set out to do (learn Python), and i discovered coursera's Intro to Python specialization program. This turned out to be much more appropriate for a beginner, and it actually covered much more material in a much shorter time-- if you've got no programming experience and want a more structured educational experience, you might try that instead of RMOTR.

RMOTR's intro to python course is probably great for people who have much more coding experience than I have, and are just looking to learn a little bit of Python to supplement their current skillsets. It is not for true beginners who are looking to learn Python as a first language.

The online environment needs some work: There's a students section and a learn section for individual assignments and for accessing lectures, and it's not clear which is which without loading them. The RMOTR environment for individual assignments is terrible if you need to higher magnification. Zoom is used for lectures, Hangouts and Cloud9 are expected for group work, Github instruction left a lot to be desired, Slack is used for general course information and off-topic memes or offensive conversations... At one point a google calendar went out, too, but I don't think it was ever updated. I highly suggest that RMOTR change their format so that it's more of an all-in-one experience, or lay out all the links, supplementing materials, expectations, and hardware/software requirements in one central location.

Mentors are available on a fairly regular basis to answer questions, which was helpful, but I wish that the material had been presented in a way that I didn't need so much handholding. With Coursera, all I needed to do was review the course materials a little more before figuring out the problems myself. The material really isn't available through RMOTR-- you really have to ask for help if you get stuck and don't have previous Python experience. The assignments for RMOTR are more about making tests pass, rather than about learning to write code.

I took this course because I heard about it through their new partnership with Women Who Code, and I feel like RMOTR has a lot more growing to do before I'd recommend this course or this company to anyone.

I've got many more comments and suggestions but RMOTR should hire me as a consultant if they want my expertise. :)

I found really interesting how well designed each project was during the course. It was not just a bunch of assignments. They were specially thought to practice each of the concepts learnt during the classes.

I also really liked the way instructors explained topics using slides and sharing screen in their computers. In my old experience with other schools, instructors were teaching concepts by typing sample snippeds that many times were boring or not really giving a good example of the topic we were covering.

Aside from everything else, the human factor involved in RMOTR is probably the greatest aggregated value this school has. I really loved the community and the group of classmates I had.

If you have enough time to commit, I recomment it.

I like the forced accountability that encouraged me to to a lot of work. I was also pushed out of my comfort zone. I was learning Python at a much slower pace before the class, and now I feel like I have a good foundation to more forward at an accelerated pace.

The schedule is a little too rigorous. But I think that may have a lot to do with me having next to no coding experience. I felt like a lot of the time most of the other students were much further ahead of me while I was catching up. Perhaps in the future, maybe encourage people more and let them know that being behind is okay and that they should not feel intimidated. But in the end, I got a lot out of it so it turned out ok :)