Why Should You Take Udacity Courses? Is Udacity worth it?

Online learning is probably the most brilliant idea on the internet. People now can learn anything there and get valuable skills from home for a small amount of money and sometimes for free without spending that much money on college, and sometimes you don’t get real-world experience for that job, but things are changing now with likes of Google and Meta providing online courses which not only teach you in-demand skills but also give some exposure to practical work.  Many online platforms are competing to get more students enrolled in their programs and one of the best is called Udacity.

1. What is Udacity?

Udacity is an online platform based in silicon valley for learning new tech skills that could help them in real life and improve their career prospects.

Learning online in Udacity is not the same as going to the university and spending years getting the degree.

Still, you can get a certificate that shows that you have different skills your competitor who only studied in the university doesn’t have.'

2. What Courses Does Udacity has?

Udacity platform is dedicated to the tech world, offering courses in information technology (IT) industries. 

This is good because you will get the skills to help you make money in the tech industry, whether getting a job or building your own business. 

These courses are separated into many sections, and currently, Udacity can teach you the skills in these industries:

1. Artificial Intelligence
2. Autonomous Systems
3. Business
4. Cloud Computing
5. Cyber Security
6. Data Science
7. Programming and Development
8. Product Management
9. Career Resources

Every section (Field) has tons of courses that you can enroll in at your own pace, and you will learn what you would expect from any standard technical university or college, like videos and online forums, to get some help from your peers.

3. Who Share Courses On Udacity?

Anyone can share his courses, unlike many online courses platforms such as Udemy and Coursera. Industry experts create Udacity courses you will gain real-world experience through projects under expert instructions.

Not everyone is accepted in Udacity to teach people these high skills in the tech industry. They are qualified and have years of experience in their field, so you won’t regret spending your time and effort learning new things on this platform.

4. What is Udacity Nanodegree?

In 2014, Udacity announced a new kind of program called Udacity Nanodegree, a unique educational program offered by the industry leaders and experts who understand the skills needed in that job market and teach them to the students to bridge the gap between the learning and real-world job skills.

You can learn at any time you want when enrolling in the Nanodegree program, which costs $399 a month, and they take around 2–6 months to complete the whole program, so Udacity has launched two ways to pay for this Nanodegree program:

4.1. Pay as you go: you will be charged $399 every month you are taking this program, so if the program will approximately take two months and you spend three months studying, you will be charged for three months, but you can cancel anytime you want.

4.2. All Access: as I’ve mentioned, every program has an estimated time to complete, let’s say six months so that you can pay for six months upfront with a discount, and if you still couldn’t finish the whole program, you can switch to the pay as you go option.

Keep in mind that the Udacity platform sometimes discounts their courses so that you will see different pricing than the usual, and it reaches up to 75% for some courses.

It is worth noting that you can get a full refund and cancel your paid enrollment after only two days in your, which is nothing, I think. 

Even it doesn’t give you enough time to decide whether this is right for you or not, but the Europe citizens can have up to 14 days to get the full refund. Here are two Nanodegree courses you may be interested in:

4.3 Become an AI Engineer : one of the best program on Udacity to learn about AI Engineering, LLM and Autonomous agent and become an expert AI engineer. 

4.4. Self-Driving Car Engineer: one of the famous and successful courses in the Udacity platform teaches you to make self-driving cars using deep learning and the python language.

4.5. Become a Data Analyst: another excellent course for learning data analysis using the python language and applying data visualizations and SQL language for interacting with the database.

5. Udacity Free Courses

There are almost 200 courses in the Udacity platform for free to students, so you can start from now registering in the platform and learn many topics, which will give you an overview of the platform and how the workflow goes and later decide whether you would like to purchase the paid courses or see another alternative.

 I will suggest some courses to start learning:

5.1. Introduction to Python Programming: This is a free python course that will teach you the basics such as data types, operators, the control flow of the code, functions, and scripting.

5.2. Advanced Android with Kotlin:  A good course created by google for teaching you advanced functionalities using Kotlin for android development such as sending notifications, animations, adding google maps, and more.

Conclusion

Udacity has created high-quality courses and constantly adds new ones that teach you the needed skills for the actual job. In my opinion, it is worth enrolling in their Nanodegree program if you want to get these skills in a short time and have your dream job instead of college, which will cost you more time and money and even less real-world experience.