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Completing a Coursera Specialization for Free

Coursera provides continuing education just like Udacity and offer the full learning experience that I am accustomed to, including lesson videos, reading materials, projects, discussion forums, and graded projects which are peer-reviewed. I recently completed the Full-stack Web Development in React specialization from Coursera, all for free. It’s called a specialization because it is made up of three courses below each with their own certifications and which takes 4-6 weeks each to complete: 1. Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools: Bootstrap 4 2. Front-End Web Development with React 3. Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express and MongoDB I started the program in December 2021 and finished it in June 2023 however. The intent of this post is to explain how I was able to fund the entire specialization for free. In December 2021, I read on social media that Coursera allowed for one free course per year if you were a student and had an email address from a partner school. I gave my stu
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Wall of Graduates from the AI Product Manager Nanodegree

The "Wall of Graduates" is a Google sites page showing a profile list of students who graduated from the Udacity AI Product Manager nanodegree. We were asked two questions to include in our profile and there are those two questions. 

What obstacles (big or small!) did you face during Phase 2 & how did you overcome them? 
 
I think the biggest was time constraint. I was also doing my Georgia Tech course in the spring and this fell on the same timeline. The other obstacle is that the course material was not technical but more for product managers. This meant a lot of time was spent networking in slack participating community-driven initiatives. I did learn Artificial Intelligence concepts but it didn't need to last from December 2020-December 2021. 

How are you making use of your newfound skills? 

I don't use AI at work but it has allowed me to open my eyes to possibilities. We recently implemented MS Azure Cognitive service utilizing text translation. Although not quite AI, it was in the neighborhood. Taking this course made me understand general concepts and how to be the product owner of that French translation service in Sharepoint Online. It also allowed me to become more immersed in the Udacity platform and as this was my first nanodegree, got to evangelize this to my peers looking to upskill. As I said, the course content was beginner-level which was the perfect place to be when starting out with MOOC type nanodegree. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience and have now progressed to taking and graduating in my second Udacity nanodegree in Cloud Native.

Here is the above Wall of Graduates submission linked here 

And here is a screenshot incase the above link becomes stale over time.







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Completing a Coursera Specialization for Free

Coursera provides continuing education just like Udacity and offer the full learning experience that I am accustomed to, including lesson videos, reading materials, projects, discussion forums, and graded projects which are peer-reviewed. I recently completed the Full-stack Web Development in React specialization from Coursera, all for free. It’s called a specialization because it is made up of three courses below each with their own certifications and which takes 4-6 weeks each to complete: 1. Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools: Bootstrap 4 2. Front-End Web Development with React 3. Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express and MongoDB I started the program in December 2021 and finished it in June 2023 however. The intent of this post is to explain how I was able to fund the entire specialization for free. In December 2021, I read on social media that Coursera allowed for one free course per year if you were a student and had an email address from a partner school. I gave my stu
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