Udacity

Udacity used to be a great online education platform that I recommended to friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. I've purchased three Nanodegree courses from them, and I was initially fascinated by their project ideas, reviews, comments, and mentors when I first discovered the platform.

In this era, thanks to sharing enthusiasts and the developer community, you can access all the knowledge or projects that Udacity can offer. This is true for most platforms, so what you pay for is the educational support from real people, customer support, certification value, and user-friendly workspaces/websites.

At Udacity, mentors generally help you out quickly when you raise a question, which is great. The value of certification depends on your country, so I won't comment on that.

Now, let's discuss the red flags that have made me stop using this platform. I'll also share my detailed recent experience.

Especially after the new update, the website and workspace are a mess, almost looking like an unfinished website. It's definitely not user-friendly. The same goes for their workspace. For example there is data that can't be downloaded due to sensitive information, and you have an AI project. It's normal to wait 4-5 hours for your train data, but in their workspace, it can be interrupted because their system automatically logs you off or experiences at least one or two crashes in day at Jupyter. This means you have to start over. Your code will be there, but you have to run every line again. Regarding customer support: at Udacity, there's never a chance to talk with real support; there's an AI chatbot (Seb) that only sends emojis and doesn't provide any useful information. They added UdacityGPT, which is incapable of answering questions. They charge money per course per month but don't provide support within 72 hours. No one cares about you after you pay. I hope people will see this post before purchasing. Also, concerning reviewers, if they're busy, they don't care about you and can even refuse to review your project. For example, if you're near to repaying next month and close to finishing your project, might reviewers will use up all the deadline and can make excuses not to check your project. If you ask for help from support, good luck – you have to wait at least 72 hours, which might only result in a response asking you a question in return.

In my capstone project, I shared my repo, code, and blog articles. In this course, I took lessons on coding and GitHub, but not on how to write articles, which makes sense because writing and sharing articles is a personal choice. In my project submission, the reviewer refused to do a review because they believe I shared too much code in the article, which definitely does not make sense. I am not sharing this article as a Udacity employee; this is my personal area and my personal choice. There was no rule in the project rubric stating that I can't share code in my article. The funny part is that, because of this, the reviewer did not do any review for my GitHub repo and code. I am here to learn coding and data science, which should be our primary goal, but this reviewer does not seem to care about this.

For now, I have clearly told the reviewer that it's my choice, and if there are any missing parts, they should address them in the review and provide me with some examples. Also, please help me understand the idea of making a perfect article if my code is not right. Let's say there is a critical mistake in my project; I would have to change the entire article. I don't understand this logic. After I wrote this to the reviewer, they are now purposely making me wait for the review and using up all the time for the deadline, which I have never experienced before at Udacity. This kind of approach is not cool, and their attempt to fool me is making me angry. 

I have always knew Udacity has a very amazing structured learning system but this time around, I personally was involved or rather, took part in it. The ALX-T Udacity Full Stack Program has been very intuitive. It has improved my logical and problem solving skill. The projects has given me a real world experience of being a full stack developer and when I saw the course content, I said to myself, "Udacity truly has my best interest at heart". One thing that  I love the most about the program is the external resources attached to each lesson. You know, reading those external resources has really broaden the scope of my mindset. The career sessions also gave me strategic approach to job searching. The program is really bent on giving each scholar a huge momentum boost in tech space. The weekly session leads has been truly phenomenal. It gave me opportunity to ask questions and get answers in real time from a real person. Everything about the program is excellent! I am truly grateful to ALX-T  and Udacity for such a lifetime opportunity.