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
I just enrolled in a course that requires running virtual machines on my Windows 10 Pro computer using VirtualBox. I couldn't start the virtual machines because of this error "The native API dll was not found (C:\WINDOWS\system32\WinHvPlatform.dll)". After doing some troubleshooting, I found this to mean that the hardware acceleration settings required by the CPU to support virtualization are currently disabled in my computer BIOS. I had to enable virtualization on my CPU chipset (VT-x/AMD-V). Seems easy enough, right? I rebooted my computer and was expecting to see the memory counter and options to get into the BIOS. It must have been so quick that it took me straight to Windows 10 login prompt right away. I tried again and as usual I am immediately back to Windows 10 login. Each time I reboot, there is a box that says my monitor is going to sleep and does not wake again until presented with Windows 10 login prompt. I can hear the disk and fans spinning during startup,