Question?

Did you or anyone you know take a nano degree from Udacity? Is it worth the money ? Do companies or academic bodies recognize it?

Some of their nanodegree courses look very interesting!!

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Interested to know about this

German here. Industry might find it a plus depending how conservative their processes are. Academia will ignore it completely.

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Is a nano degree a very tiny degree or a degree for nano ?

Following.
PS: I wish there was a way to follow specific rants on devrant other than commenting on it (At least that is what I think those '.' comments are for)

@guthix42 I think there is or were you bring sarcastic? :)

When you open a rant, in the top right corner you'll see 3 horizontal dots. Hit that and you'll have the option to subscribe to the rants

Nano degrees look very appealing especially the job placement part except I'm not in the US so I can't take advantage of that part.

Im definitely gonna take 1 or 2 this year

@soulkicks

Thats "Subscribe to users rants"...not the rant lol

@SHA-256 yup. My mistake lol

I'm currently enrolled in AI Nanodegree or AIND. I'll answer your question in 2 parts, is it worth it and post-nanodegree.

First, figure out if Udacity's teaching method fits your learning by going thru some of it's free content. Most content in the ND are similar to those available for free. My course had a lot of new content as Intro to AI was shot since the founding of Udacity, so a lot of it are remade along with additional content. Content wise, I personally think that they're very relevant for the latest stack as Google and recently Facebook are using Udacity as their training partner.

What you don't get as a free user is the mentor, office hour and project reviews. I excluded community as that is pretty subjective, but we do have a Slack and a forum. I got a mentor that has a phD in AI, there will be a weekly reminder to check in with them too, and you can basically ask them any questions. Office hour happens every month or so, you can submit questions in forum to be answered, for AIND, Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Udacity is answering them. As Udacity is built on the idea that you'll be job ready by the end of the course, you will be building your portfolio during the course in the form of projects. You can submit your project attempts and receive feedback at your own pace for however times you like (which you don't get in school) and sometimes even further tips on how to expand ur project despite hitting all the requirements already. Overall, if you think you need mentorship and guidance, it's very worth it.

On careers, Udacity is build not on graduating students only but to get them hired. They have been very active in getting more hiring partners on board, with companies like AT&T, Samsung, Slack and many more. Also, they have a hiring platform for paying students too. Along with courses that prepares you on how to write your resume and other hiring tips. In the US, they have some guarantee on hiring, but I'm not very sure as I'm not US based.

Sorry for the spam, and feel free to hit me with any questions!

@soulkicks where are you from? In my country they apparently provide placement assistance and interview opportunities for those who pass the course

@HoloDreamer I'm from Jamaica. Last I checked they didn't have job placement for my region (Caribbean)