Udacity

Broad on topics, modern and useful content. 

Projects are related to what is seen in class.

Maybe we need a more formal explanation of certain techniques such as Adam and GANs.

Will be a plus more documented exercises and projects,

as example: put in the description of a function the shape of the input and the ouput

def func(x):

"""

x: pytorch tensor (b,h,w,c)

b: batch dimension

h: height 

w: wide 

c: number of channels

"""

Add for every module a 'intuition section' and make more profund quizzes.

In general is an excellent and complete specialization. Even includes a deployment module.

I was curious to study on Udacity to learn high tech contect and get the Nanodegree certification because of the success stories  I had been seeing of twitter on how people got a job after their Nanodegree.

I was selected for grant by Egypt Government African App Launchpad to study AI Programming with Python, I was extremely passionate about learning what AI is and how I can build solutions to my community using AI Applications.

I highly recommend beginners or anyone curious and passionate about AI to take the  AI Programming with Python Nanodgree, because it is totally beginners friendly, I was  taught right Python Hello World to other python libraries and other packages, the maths part of AI then Neural Networks and deep learning, which have been a awesome experience to me in building a new skillset and become employable in job market today.

First and foremost, Udacity has great content including their videos and their code repositories which are hosted on GitHub.  The explanations are not overly complex (if sometimes a little contrived).  There are periodic quizzes in the content to help solidify concepts along with solutions if it is confusing.

The curriculum itself is well-organized and (from what I can tell) is organized in modular blocks so that the same module can be applied in different Nanodegrees.  This would be a con if I was taking other Nanodegrees and discovered that I had already learned about a specific module previously.  However, I do like the structure of it and it makes sense in the order in which it is presented.

Lastly, the in-browser Jupyter Notebook experience on Udacity cannot be beat.  It is very easy to use and the autosave is trustworthy (I never experienced a loss of work when closing the browser or losing my connection).

I take the udacity basic nanodegree program in September 2019, i actually get this as a gift to my birthday from my wife. The course is about  how to make android basic apps.
 

Since day 1 i am logging in the udacity website i was so excited about this course since this is really what i want to learn. Honestly, udacity really surpass beyond my expectation about online course. 
 
Here is something i notice as a plus point of udacity :

1. Clear achievement purpose. In udacity you will be given some topic and project to clear. This topic is really coherence to what you want to achieve;

2. The material is presented in detail and clear. Have you had an online course that made you thinking "why am i taking this course when this material is literally all over google?".
Well, Udacity is NOT of that course, the team is really detail about material that i guarantee if you want to "googling" about all material without knowing the framework you will take months of googling.

3. The project is related to real case in real life. All project in udacity is so related to real case i need to solve in real life. For example, by finishing project 4 now i can make some music player which is real beneficial when i need a media player in my android apps. The project you submit is also reviewed in code where the reviewer give suggestion how to write better code.

4. Career development. Udacity is not only giving material about android apps, but also teaching you how to create a good profile in linked in an github account so that you can have better chance getting carrier in real project.

5. Video call with tutor. This is really big plus point since you have your private tutor to ask whenever you had trouble with code.

however there are some point you may want to consider before taking course :

1. since the course fee is paid monthly, you may want to schedule it first to your daily schedule before taking course because the longer you finished the course the more expensive it will be. In my experience , the average time to finish nanodegree program is about three months with cost $399/month. However, you can achieve quicker than the average, i have heard many stories about student who can finish nanodegree program in two month or even one month. I finished my nanodegree in three month, but i really confidence if i take another course i can finish it in one/two months.

2. clear about what you want to achieve. You may be spending hours to complete the course, if you are not clear what you want to achieve you may lost interest in the middle of the course.

CONCLUSION

Here is my conclusion about udacity :

Udacity is not a cheap course BUT it will make you expensive. in my case, i start getting $ from apps and side job from knowledge that i learned from udacity. 

I was a middle class student from Nepal and i was living on remote village. One day i found about Udacity and then i signed up for Secure and Private AI challenge course. And in 3 month period of the course from june 2019, i turned into something else. I found the greates motivation factor ;slack channe;'; Plus the quatlity of content is very high. The contents were made for absolute beginner and i was not that beginner because i had done OCR using numpy, keras, OpenCv before joining course. We also had a project showcase and our team got 2nd place on that. Here is the link of medium article i wrote during that period of challenge https://medium.com/secure-and-private-ai-writing-challenge/crowd-counting-made-easy-1bf84f18ff61. I was having my semester exam at that time but motivation i had from slack community was great and i got passed on semester and got Deep Learning Nanodegree also. Deep Learning Nanodegree lasted for 4 months and i graduated from it few days ago. Additionally, i am also a student on Udacity's other challenge courses like Intel Edge AI, Bertelsman Tech Scholarship. Due to the Udacity's courses, i got AI intern and i am now teaching AI on local academy. Plus i do organize some AI meetups. From the bottom of my heart Udacity changed my life. For my details, here is my linked in profile:https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramkrishna-acharya-91a217183/ .

I'm yet to see an introductory course that truly delivers on its promises like this one. I start from zero to building Deep Learning models that classify images and achieve an accuracy of 95% using PyTorch.

The instructors were super awesome and very knowledgeable about the subjects. I learn not just the Neural Networks, but also the underlying Maths and how everything gets tied together.

I'm very confident in my ability, and I highly recommend this course for absolute beginners and experienced devs alike, who are planning to dive into this exciting field of AI.

FYI: The course is safe-contain, you'll learn everything within the course. Yeah, you heard me right, all the Python, the Maths (you'll thank me for this), the Neural Network. Exciting right?

I moved to the UK 5 years ago, I had 1 goal in Mind, to make tomorrow better for me and my wife here, I have built few applications using HTML5,CSS3, Query and PHP but i never felt like i'm ready to work as a sofware developer, something was missing!

in 2016, i heared about the Google/Udacity front end Nanodegree which i applied for, first email came with i was rejected, i was so upset but few minutes later i received another email saying i was accepted and the first email was sent by mistake :) i was over the moon.

in 2017 my wife gave birth to our baby boy Youssef, everything started to be hard especially the time, i didn't have time at all, but i was 2 months away from finishing the couse, i bought IPad to watch and follow the course during the rest time at my old work until the course was over in november 2017.

when the course finished i felt like i'm ready to work as a web developer, i updated my cv, and few months later i was accepted as a web developer at medium size insurance company in the UK.

so proud i took this course at Udacity.

Thanks to everyone who got envolved with this couse.

I love the way that Udacity sets up their content!  I first was motivated to try them out when they offered their free courses on JavaScript, GitHub, etc.  Because I was active on their platform, I decided to be notified via email of all events and opportunities with this program.  Once the application for the Grow With Google scholarships opened, I took advantage and won!  Their Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree program gave me the foundation skills needed to know everything about this great field and has properly prepared me for employment.  Their videos are no longer than 2 minutes a piece but very thorough and informative instructions.  The exercises were fun to do which made learning how to code a pleasure and not boring.  The best part about the program was the community in the forums.  Whenever I was stuck on a problem, I reached out to somebody in the forums and got the help that I needed.  The minor issues I experienced with the program was my mentor being unassigned to me without my knowledge and the program didn't give me another one prior to graduation.  If they can have backup mentors ready for whoever decides to join this great program, it would be helpful.  As I stated earlier, the community in the forums is what really helped my success and anybody looking to learn web development should definitely start here! I hope that I can obtain employment soon as I'm still looking for work in this field.