[ralmidani]

Back in 2013 when I first discovered MOOCs, Udacity was more like Coursera and edX in that they had mostly traditional CS and Math courses.

Now, in the catalog, the various Nanodegrees appear before any individual course. But if you scroll down, you'll see they still offer the old courses in topics like Programming Languages, Theoretical CS, and Differential Equations.

Personally, I'm not in a rush to find employment, and am deliberately focusing on edX in order to prepare for a Masters. I took MIT's Intro to Programming with Python, and am now in Software Construction with Java. Both feel like timeless courses teaching principles applicable to any language or environment. Do Udacity Nanodegrees similarly teach transferable skills?

[BWStearns]

It seems that the nano degrees are meant to provide a specific practical skill set as opposed to a broader academic inquiry. I think those skill sets are valuable (taking algo trading now), but the course is about how to use Python and statistics to build machine learning programs for finance, not about Python, stats, or finance. Maybe it's a bit of a distinction without a difference though because you'll have the beachhead from which to expand into each of those areas afterward.