What You Want to Know About Udacity Online Courses
Online courses are becoming increasingly popular, replacing traditional full-time education to prepare for the professions of the future. This is because with eLearning students have more control over the learning process as well as the opportunity to revisit the training as needed. Online courses can help you improve your education and career at the right time and in the right place. Because of the key market players - Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy.
Almost all online courses are presented in the format of video lectures with a set of slides, through which the learning process takes place. Video lectures are most often downloadable for local viewing, as are presentation slides and subtitles. For example, the Udacity mobile application allows you to download video lectures directly to your phone, or tablet.
- Part 1: What is Udacity?
- Part 2: What courses you can learn on Udacity
- Part 3: The Udacity certification
- Part 4: The Udacity pricing
- Part 5: Prototyping tool you will need
What is Udacity?
Udacity - a private educational organization, founded by Sebastian Tran, David Stavensom, and Michael Sokolski, with the aim of democratization of education.
Udacity is one of the most popular MOOC providers in the world. Since the company has such huge popularity and reach, there are many people who want to find reliable Udacity reviews and learn more about it.
The "Nano Degree" certification program launched by Udacity, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other world-leading technology companies. These world-leading technology companies have trained students to become technology developers in the fields of data science, artificial intelligence, driverless, and blockchain. At present, Udacity has become the world's leading cutting-edge technology education platform and has become an online education "unicorn" company with a valuation of more than US$1 billion.
Udacity is more practice-oriented. From basic statistics to machine learning itself, it teaches a variety of standard technologies to carry out masterful program designs. The final test of the program is a "graduation project" of the student's choice. And although anyone can complete such a project on their own, the desire to get a certificate can be a very good motivation. As a result, you will need to invest a lot more time and effort than an independent third-party project, but at the same time, you will have a sense of pride in yourself and the result.
The founder of Udacity explains that online learning should not compete with university education. These are vocational training courses, which have an extremely practical task - to prepare a person to work in a specific profession. In such a situation, learning becomes more focused: nothing superfluous is given to a person, but only the necessary knowledge, so the whole process goes faster.
What courses you can learn on Udacity
Most of the courses at Udacity are about information technology, and for a reason: the educational platform grew out of a free IT course hosted at Stanford University. In addition to courses that teach technical skills, Udacity offers programs in entrepreneurship, design, mathematics, and physics.
Udacity offers both standalone courses and timed programs (Nanodegrees). Free lessons are about privacy, no personal feedback, or a sense of community. Paid offerings (Courses and Nanodegrees) include standardized feedback from Udacity coaches as well as verified graduation certificates. Artificial Intelligence, Business oriented, Cloud Computing, Data Sciences, Programming & Development courses are available on Udacity. Udacity offers almost 50 courses on these subjects.
Initially, Udacity was conceived as a platform on which everyone can take courses from well-known universities for free, but gradually the focus shifted to more applied programs developed, among other things, in collaboration with large companies from the high-tech sector. As a rule, the skills that Udacity promises to teach will be needed by those who are going to work or are already working in IT.
Duration of courses: depends on the wishes of the participant, there is no set deadline for the course. The description of each course indicates the approximate duration of the course based on 6 hours of lessons per week. If you follow this pace, then one course can be completed, on average, 6-10 weeks.
Language of instruction: English, some courses are accompanied by subtitles in Spanish, French, Portuguese, or Chinese.
The Udacity certification
Udacity hopes to provide high quality, low-cost university education. Thus, to achieve this goal, the platform brings together commendable instructors and a large number of students from all over the world. Although Udacity began offering university-style courses, it now focuses more on professional courses for professionals. Udacity also offers self-paced courses and programs they call Nanodegrades. These degrees provide you with feedback, coaches, a sense of community membership, and a verified certificate.
Upon completion of the course, participants receive an electronic Udacity certificate of completion of the program. The Udacity certificate is not an official document for professional development or professional retraining. The main thing is knowledge and skills: for example, courses developed with the participation of Georgia Tech is offered at the same level as for students of this university. For some courses, it is possible to obtain a Verified Certificate, which can be recognized by employers.
Free Course costs not even a single dime. Nanodegree programs feature cutting-edge online curriculum built with industry leaders and taught by expert instructors. Graduates earn an industry-recognized credential and benefit from extensive career support
The Udacity pricing
Price is probably the most controversial topic when discussing online learning platforms. Most of these platforms have different methods of evaluating their courses and features ( subscriptions, one-time payments, bundles, and so on ). However, even with a wide variety of pricing models, it is still difficult to find a balance between satisfying your customers' needs and making money.
Udacity offers over 200 courses to students completely free of charge. You can go to the site, register, and start learning. However, as I mentioned earlier in this review, these courses rarely have any student-student or student-teacher interaction. As for the real price on the Nanodegree special program here, things immediately gaining great momentum.
The Nanodegree course starts at $ 200 per month and can last from 2 to 12 months. By simple calculations, you can find out that the price for one course of Udacity Nanodegree can reach $ 2400! This is a very high cost, especially considering one fact - there is no middle bar here.
Prototyping tool you will need
Prototyping is a quick draft implementation of basic site functionality. Allows, depending on the task, with a different number of details to depict the main possibilities of the future product. Prototyping is especially useful if you need to create an online store. Such sites always have a complex structure, many pages and a lot of work with the placement of accents and management of the visitor's attention.
Wondershare Mockitt allows you to test prototypes in real time on Android and iOS devices or directly in the browser, smart templates make the prototyping process very fast and easy. The tool is clear, flexible and allows you to solve a variety of tasks. With Mockitt, you can demonstrate and test the full range of clicks, gestures and other functions. That is, Wondershare Mockitt is the perfect tool for mobile app designers.
Wondershare Mockitt has a large library of ready-made templates for the design of web pages and mobile applications, with which you can develop a model of any level of complexity. With Wondershare Mockitt, you can create an information structure or a block diagram of your online store to think through visitor behavior and write use cases. At any stage, you can leave a note so as not to forget what thought was behind the new section or icon. Colleagues can comment on the layout or parts of it with notes. It is possible to correspond and maintain a joint discussion.
Wondershare Mockitt keeps a history of project changes. You can manage different versions and keep track of how the prototype has changed in the process. Also, it supports third-party extensions, which allows you to add ready-made interface elements to layouts. If a designer does not want to completely abandon the use of wireframes, then the Wondershare Mockitt tool is for him. It is a really powerful tool that allows you to quickly achieve your goals, but its main advantage is that it can be used to create fully interactive prototypes.
Let's still summarize and highlight the main advantages of the Mockitt program:
- Collaborate on documents in real time.
- Storing information in a remote "cloud" and the ability to access it from anywhere.
- Windows, Mac, Linux support this service.
- A lot of useful functionality, including interactive prototypes, vector grids, components and much more useful for working in the field of web design.
Teamwork benefits:
- access to editing documents;
- versions are stored without time limits;
- it is possible to create a library with UI elements;
- you can create personal projects and provide access for them to other users of the service.
