Online courses and how to avail financial aid, audit course
All of you must have already registered for your Mu Learn classes by now and have gotten sorted into your batches. Now, the question is how do we get the financial aid for the online courses? All of them looks like it could burn a hole in our pocket and we being learners want to learn a lot of stuff; not just one course.
Being a developing nation, online learning is really empowering for anybody who is willing to learn. We can be in any part of the world and still learn every day about anything and everything as long as you are connected to the internet. I have been doing several courses in Coursera since 2015! I have found it to be a fun way of learning things.
Now, when it comes to online learning there are many options these days like Edx, Coursera, Udacity, Udemy etc. Udacity and Udemy are the main players in terms of online education. Edx is very rigorous compared to the rest while Coursera is more accessible. Edx has all of its content available for free but most of the graded content on Coursera is behind a paywall. There are nanodegree courses offered by Udacity which are exceptional but they cost more and there is no audit option available. Udemy provides cheaper courses from freelancers. Now that we have seen some of the options available, let’s concentrate on Coursera for the time being.
Coursera offers many courses in different domains, for example, I have taken a course on wine tasting, music, history, physics, philosophy and language. Since most of you reading this article will be interested in technological content, there are plenty of courses available for programming, web development, game development and artificial intelligence algorithms on this platform.
I usually recommend or send a link on one of the courses in Coursera to my friends or colleagues, but when they try to enroll all they see is the “Pay with Money” option which is big and cleverly placed right in the middle, due to the design of the website. Well, you can’t blame them! They do need money to keep it alive and running.
Coursera
I recommend Coursera as a start as it is the most accessible on in my opinion.It has good dashboards and navigation panes in its UI and active discussion forums for most courses which will greatly help us track and do the assignments.
When you first try to enroll in a specialization this is what you see. There is no audit option for that you need to go to individual pages of the courses in the specialization.
This is what you see when you try to enroll in a course in that specialization or any individual course on the platform. As you can see there is a tiny audit button at the bottom of the pop up that most people miss out. Majority of them say that they are unable to enroll unless they pay for the course and give up on the plan.
The straightforward option that Coursera and similar websites who makes online contents prefer is for their users to pay for the courses and support them. If you are willing and can afford to do that, then check out the course during its trial period and decide whether the course is for you and if it covers all your expectations. You can check the reviews on Coursera and on “Class-central” — a website that tracks and rates online courses.
Now if you are short on money, one of the best options is to do a subscription for specializations. If you are someone who can do marathon study hours give a shot for the option to subscribe. You can subscribe for a specialization for as low as Rs 3000/- a month and do all the courses available in that specialization. So, essentially you get 4–5 courses at the cost of one. I have completed many specializations in a span of one month. It was the only thing that i did that month as I was just out of college and was taking out some time for myself. I am just stating that it is possible to do so and do not think it is hypothetical.
Another option that is present is to audit and access all the materials of a course except for the graded materials. When I started out on Coursera, I was able to access graded materials for free but we had to pay for the certificate. Now, most of the new courses’ graded materials are behind a paywall. The good news is that the old courses which shaped and made Coursera successful are still free and you can access all the graded materials as well. They still hold good value.
If you want to enroll for a specialization, then you have to go through the individual pages of each course and enroll in audit for each one of them.From specialization page go to individual course pages to audit the courses in the specialization.
If you really want you can apply for financial aid. After 15 days of putting your request, it will get approved and you can access all the course content including grades materials and will get a certificate after completing the course. If you want to enroll in specialization, that has multiple courses, you have to apply for financial aid separately. This also doesn’t take any space on the UI. You may not notice it that at first, but it’s available option if you don’t have the money and really need the certificate. Although, do not misuse the financial aid.It is a great program that allows you to get a certificate for free for world class content.
Before the paywall was present, I usually applied for financial aid after completing the course. Even now, I try to do whatever materials I can do on audit before applying for financial aid. Now that I don’t do as many courses as I did before, I do not apply for financial aid. Before, I could just complete the course and get the certificate but now I have to think before applying for financial aid as it this that important since I have to finish this course. If you are a student, I know that you may not be able to pay for these courses, but, I encourage you to pay for the courses if you can and make full use of the Coursera platform.
I have added a few courses which I found really help full and interesting to me, you can check that out to get started and thank you for reading.
Recommended courses on Coursera based on my experience
If you are new to online learning this course will help you out.I recommend it to anyone passionate about learning.
I have listed some of the courses that I really liked down below: -
- The Java and Python specializations really helped me with my programming and debugging skills.
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/python
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/java-programming
- As for Machine learning, I started with a Machine Learning course from Stanford and then went on to do the Machine Learning specialization from Washington.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/mathematics-machine-learning
- In case of Deep Learning, there is a specialization by Andrew NG, which covers most of the commonly used techniques.
- If you want to learn about Data Science, the Data Science specialization by Johns Hopkins University is a great start, it uses R as the programming language and covers data cleaning, data visualization and modeling with excellent practical exercises.
- For Advanced machine learning specialization, you can do image captioning, image generation using auto-encoders and GANs, kaggle competition, face recognition, Chatbots. For the final course, you can apply machine learning to solve challenges that are currently active research in CERN.
- The Robotics specialization from University of Pennsylvania covers basic search, motion planning and perception algorithms.
Fast.ai courses on deep learning, Udacity nano degrees and edx micro masters are also great resources. All theses resources are out there and I wish you all the best in using them to your best if abilities.
