I’m glad to see a deep learning specialisation by Andrew Ng finally online. As someone who has completed Prof. Ng’s ML course on coursera and really had his interest piqued by it, I can wait to take this one.
I did notice however that it is NOT a free course. Usually one can access all the materials and assignments without paying and only need pay for the certificate, which is great as the learning is freely available. This specialisation allows free access only for 1 week. Doing justice to this 5-course specialisation in just 1 week is some Ethan Hunt level stuff.
Truth be told, it’s been a while since I used Coursera for my MOOC needs, edX covers most of it and being from India, I know of and use NPTEL too. So I was surprised by this monetisation and this inspired me to investigate. I found that this 7-day trial scheme with subsequent monthly payments is Coursera-wide, not just for this course. Pardon my ignorance, for those of you, for whom this is not news.
While I am aware that holding Coursera, a for-profit organization, to edX’s standards is impractical as at the end of the day Coursera has mouths to feed, I still believed that both were, at the core, for-learning organizations.
Andrew Ng’s machine learning on Coursera was my first online learning experience. I have come a long way since then, with Coursera and other MOOC providers, although now I would technically classify Coursera as MOC provider, and I am disheartened to know that I may not return to Coursera.
Go deep or go home :)
