Coursera just did something extraordinary

Coursera just launched a new offering called "Guided Projects"! These are bite sized offerings that takes you through a given topic in a step-by-step fashion. The offering is cheap, costing around $14 per Guided Project. Your first Guided Project can also be free provided you sign up for one before 6/12/2020! Each Guided Project also takes about 1 - 2 hrs to complete - a significant departure from most Coursera offerings that take weeks to complete.

I think this will be a game changer for Coursera as the challenge with taking courses on Coursera and other MOOCs has always been completing the courses on time. Coursera charges a per month fee on some of its courses, hence for busy professionals, this can really be money sink if you can't keep to the course schedule. However with Guided Projects, you can complete an offering in as little time as 1 hour - basically in a single sitting for most people.

A quick scan through of the courses available on Guided Projects shows that they are geared more towards data science, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) topics so readers of my blog will really find it useful. If you do, please leave a note so I know.

Some of the topics on Guided Projects include

1. Object-Oriented Programming with Java

2. Creating your first game with Python

3. Predicting House Prices with Regression using TensorFlow

4. Image Classification with CNNs using Keras

5. Multiple Linear Regression with scikit-learn

If you are new to ML and AI or not sure if you should jump in (either based on perceived difficulty or time commitment), Guide Projects might be the vehicle you've been waiting for to start your ML/AI journey. It's short enough that you won't get bored and cheap enough such that you won't feel a significant financial pinch. It will really be interesting to see how this product from one of the most innovative edTech companies out there performs in the market.

Happy Learning!