This year, I enrolled in Andrew Ng’s awesome Deep Learning Specialization series consisting of 5 different courses on Coursera; all for free. While chatting with people about this, I realized that people usually don’t know to what extend you can make use of the course material when you enroll for free. So I wanted to share my experiences here and I hope it helps someone.
Videos
You have access to all the videos and their transcripts, even after the course ends.
Quizzes
You can submit your answers to the quizzes but you can’t see the correct answers and how well you did.
Projects
You have all the access to the notebooks and all the files that the notebook requires to run properly. You can download these onto your local machine and run them locally if you wish too. (This was useful for me whenever I wanted to work on my projects at a time/place without any internet connection.) You cannot access the project notebooks after the course ends though. So either finish your projects on time, or be prepared and download all the necessary files on your machine for later access.
Getting graded
Of course you cannot submit your project notebooks and get graded. However, the team behind this MOOC has prepared all the notebooks in a way that they guide you and then they tell you the expected results of the step you’re implementing. Seeing the expected results after every step of your implementation is very helpful because you can spot your mistakes early instead of trying to understand what is wrong with your code; only at the end.
So if you can get all the expected results with your implementation, you get your feedback that your solution gets the job done and you feel like you got a good grade :]
Certification
Since you don’t get graded, you don’t expect to get a certificate either.
So, to wrap up: If your only aim is to learn and experiment; enrolling for free can get you almost all the benefits in my opinion. The “expected results” on the notebooks give you the necessary feedback for your projects and you can get your hands on all the materials. If getting a certificate is not important for you; enrolling for free could you be your feasible solution to enjoy all this fantastic material.
Don’t forget to praise this awesome course at every opportunity though :] because the effort behind all that material is huge and Andrew Ng is a great tutor in my opinion.
Let me know if you have any questions and I’d be more than happy to help!