[Kluny]

I've heard a lot of positive reviews of Udacity's courses, but I wonder if those come from people's bias after sinking a lot of money and time into it. Has anyone done a nanodegree on their employer's dime (regular wage plus tuition)? What did you think?

[andreyk]

I took the Data Analyst nanodegree, paid entirely by my company as you say. I don't think it's really worth it as the classes are pretty shallow and undemanding, but after a year of doing it I did get a lot of exposure to different languages/technologies and the opportunity to do several cool projects (here's an example http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/visualizing-imdb-data-...).

So I think for expanding your knowledge base while being employed or doing other things, it's quite good (and, there is also Udacity's MS program with Georgia Tech for more serious education and credentials). It is even perhaps worth paying the $100 a month yourself if you put in the work to finish a bit early (the deadlines are set so it takes 13 months if you don't try to finish early). But, there is a lot they could do to improve - the nano degrees really are a bunch of totally separate MOOC classes strung together.

[Kluny]

Data Analyst is actually the one I'm interested in. Did you have a background in data science already that made the course seem entry-level to you? How hard did you push yourself?

[andreyk]

I had background in data science insofar as I had taken a statistics course, learned quite a bit about machine learning, and just generally done a lot of CS (but I had barely done any data viz/database querying/applied statistics). For people with only cursory experience with CS, the need to learn a bunch of new languages and tools (R, Python (+pandas/scikit-learn), MongoDB, SQL, maybe more) will probably make the content much less easy.

The courses did not push me to work that hard - all of them had just one deadline which was the project submission, and there were usually 2-3 months between deadlines and I got away with only seriously working on it the last 3-4 weeks most of the time. That being said, the projects were of good quality - pretty substantial, with good rubrics, and good ability to choose from easy options or do your own things. And, once again my extensive background in CS and ML probably made things easier than it would be for many people.

To be clear, I did not mind the courses not being that deep since I did not really want to be really busy with courses while working full time. I just think if these are for getting into being a professional in the field, they are not quite as deep as I might like for that.

[Kluny]

Sounds like you've got quite a bit more background than me, anyway. Thanks for the insight. One of my interests is actually in getting into agricultural data, and I was thinking the course might be a good step (as opposed to doing a full-on CS degree, which is probably what I'll have to do otherwise - no one seems too impressed with my community college + 3 years of work experience).

[spikefromspace]

I did the Tech Entrepreneur nanodegree over a period of 7 months. With the half your money back offer, I ended up paying $700 into the course and ended the course with an interactive prototype and a marketing plan. Both of those I still use to move my product development forward, so I felt that it was money well spent.

In comparison, I have taken classes in my grad school that I spent $1200+ on that I ended with anything to show for it.

I will say though that Udacity show more preview content and maybe a longer trial period (currently 7 days). I did try the Android nanodegree and felt it was not worth my time but that was because of my experience in it.