Online learning, as a term, encompasses everything from apps for learning languages to getting a master’s degree. The more online learning grows, the more it can fulfill specific needs and wants. Udacity’s niche is in delivering rigorous courses that teach highly specific job-related skills, mostly in the tech arena. If you’re in the market for a specific job-focused skill to advance your career or get experience for a new career, Udacity certainly delivers. Prices end up being a little high if you enroll in a course that takes three or four months (most do), but you’ll end up with work samples that you can use in future job applications.
Learners come away not only with new skills but also fairly often with sample projects to show their work. While Udacity offers a handful of courses that aren’t technical in nature, the majority are. Many courses are also developed with industry partners, suggesting you will learn the skills that these companies want in job candidates. Courses are highly focused. Take for example the course called Self-Driving Car Engineer, developed in partnership with Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia, Uber, and others. It teaches computer vision, deep learning, sensor fusion, and other topics related to self-driving vehicles, and it requires that you already know Python, C++, and general math.
What Does Udacity Offer?
Udacity offers intensive learning programs called Nanodegrees, a handful of free courses, and some services for job hunters, such as a professional reviews of your resume and candidate materials.
The heart of Udacity’s catalog is Nanodegrees. Nanodegrees are courses designed to give practical, real-world knowledge and experience to people who are either looking to advance their careers or get started in a new one. By and large, these courses fall under the larger umbrella of computing sciences, though there are some in marketing, business, and a few other categories. Nanodegree courses typically include professional services, such as reviews of your resume and LinkedIn page, and when relevant, reviews of your GitHub page.
Udacity is not an accredited institution, and therefore these Nanodegrees do not have the same weight as a matriculated degree from an accredited university or college. Nanodegrees are designed for practical application because they “represent collaborations with our industry partners,” according to Udacity’s site, “who help us develop our content and who hire many of our program graduates.” Some examples of industry partners are AT&T, Intel, Google, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, and Tableau.
PCMag cannot attest to the success rate of people who complete a Nanodegree and end up with a job offer or promotion. To write this review, we audited one Nanodegree course to get a sense of how thorough it was, in addition to looking at some of the free courses. More on those experiences in a bit.
As of this writing, Udacity offers more than 60 courses. The courses are grouped into the following Programs:
- Programming and development
- Artificial intelligence
- Cloud computing
- Data science
- Business
- Autonomous systems
One more category, called Career, consists mostly of interview prep courses for jobs that fall under the wide umbrella of computer science, such as machine learning, Full-Stack, Android, and iOS. Some of these courses are free.
Of the Programs shown above, Business may seem like the outlier to the computing sciences/math theme, until you dig into the specific offerings: Establishing Data Infrastructure, SQL, Data Engineer, AI for Business Leaders, and so forth. Only a few courses are not computationally intensive, but there are some, like Digital Marketing and Product Manager.
If you want to get a sense of Udacity, you can always dip your toe into one of its free courses first. Some are fitting for an extremely broad audience, such as Refresh Your Resume, Craft Your Cover Letter, and Strengthen Your LinkedIn Network and Brand. But there’s also a 10-week intermediate level course called Introduction to Machine Learning, a three-week class on A/B Testing for Business Analysts, and a two-month advanced class on Applied Cryptography.
What Do You Need to Enroll?
You don’t need to prove you have any special background or prior experience to enroll in any Udacity course, but each course does have a list of prerequisites. Only a few require no prior knowledge. Before you enroll, Udacity tells you whether the course is for the beginner, intermediate, or advanced level; how long it takes learners on average to complete the course; what skills you’ll learn; and any prerequisites.
For example, there’s a Nanodegree called Intro to Self-Driving Cars. It’s an intermediate level course that takes about four months to complete. It covers computer vision, machine learning, vehicle motion, and control. Participants are required to have prior knowledge of programming and mathematics.
If the prerequisites ever sound too vague, you can always dive into a more detailed description of the minimum prerequisites and desired prior experience. Similarly, you can get more details about the estimated time to complete the course by looking at the class’s details, which will say something like, “4 months at 5-10 hours per week.”
Although you can work through the class material at your own pace and complete assignments asynchronously, most classes have some deadlines. For example, there’s usually a deadline to enroll (though it’s unclear how strict it is or whether it’s a ploy to get you to “sign up now before it’s too late!”). Assignments also typically have deadlines.
How Much Does Udacity Cost?
As mentioned, some classes are free, but the Nanodegree programs cost on average between $339 and $399 per month.
Most often, Udacity offers you a three- or four-month enrollment for $1,017 or $1,356, respectively, which breaks down to $339 per month. Alternatively, if you don’t want to make a big payment upfront, you opt into a monthly $399 payment. If you go for the multi-month option and don’t finish the course in that time, you can switch to paying monthly until you finish. If you’re ambitious, you might choose to pay monthly and try to plow through a course as quickly as possible to save money.
Udacity advertises financial assistance. It also partners with the loan payment company affirm, which allows you to spread out payments over a longer period to make each installment lower (though you could end up paying a higher total amount this way).
There is a self-service cancellation option in your account, as well as the option to permanently remove your credit card details. You can also request a copy of your data and permanently delete your account using self-service tools. Details such as these give users plenty of assurance that Udacity takes people’s ability to manage their accounts and cancel their membership seriously.
How Much Do Other Learning Courses Cost?
Compared with other sites that offer classes that aren’t part of an accredited degree program, Udacity’s prices are high.
Consider Coursera, which costs about $39-$49 per month. Like Udacity, it partners with major companies such as IBM and Google to offer classes that teach skills those companies want and need, many in technology and science. Courses can take anywhere from a few months to a year to complete, but at $39 per month, that’s only $468 for a year. Moreover, a lot of courses are available for free if you merely audit them, meaning you get all the lectures and readings, but you don’t submit assignments, nor do you receive a certificate upon completion.
Skillshare, LinkedIn Learning, and other sites offer professional development courses, too. They have more soft skill courses, like business leadership, as well as tutorials for specific computer programs, such as Photoshop and InDesign. Skillshare has dropped its prices recently to be less than $30 per year. LinkedIn Learning comes included with a paid LinkedIn account, and those run approximately $240-$576 per year. Paid LinkedIn accounts come with a lot of additional benefits, such as added tools for job hunting, networking, and recruiting.
Setting You Up for Success
Before we get into the content of any Udacity course, let’s consider a few aspects shared by all the courses.
For starters, the classes use a lot of video-based lessons. In addition, you get downloadable materials and interactive quizzes for nearly every course. The video player offers closed captioning, as well as subtitles in at least one other language, in our experience. Speed controls let you make the video play faster or slower. It’s all hosted by YouTube, so if you’re familiar with its basic controls, that’s what you get from Udacity as well.
Nanodegree courses set you up for success by providing a clear syllabus, asking you about your learning goals, and helping you plan how and when you’ll complete your program. The site prompts you to create a study plan by committing to working through X hours of material on days of the week that you select.
Udacity helps you fill out the study planner based on when you want to complete the course. For example, if you need to do 10 hours of work per week to stay on track, and you tell Udacity you only want to study twice a week, the site suggests five hours of study on each of those days. The suggested number of hours changes dynamically based on your input.
If you want them, Udacity also sends you email reminders to log in and make progress on days when you’ve committed to it. This study planner is actually quite helpful to figuring out what you need to do to stay on course. However, it’s based on the estimated amount of time you need to put in rather than based on course markers, such as completing Lesson 1, Lesson 2, and so forth. Your actual pace may vary considerably from Udacity’s expectations.
Nanodegree courses also require you to upload assignments. You learn more about when these are due while getting started, too.
Downloadable materials typically show up as needed during the course, except for the grand syllabus. So rather than downloading all the course materials at the start, you receive them one at a time when they’re relevant.
Learners in the Nanodegree programs get access to mentors, who provide guidance, answer questions, and help learners complete their courses. Mentors are vetted people who work in some capacity for Udacity, but anyone can apply to be a mentor. Mentors must demonstrate proficiency in the relevant field and then commit to answering questions and providing guidance to learners.
Inside a Udacity Nanodegree Course
To test the service, Udacity provided us with access to its Digital Marketing course, one of the few courses that isn’t highly technical but is still quite rigorous. It’s taught primarily through video lectures, which are interspersed with written content containing links to other additional resources.
The video lectures use a variety of speakers, usually one or two for each section of the course. You learn a little about their background, and then they dive into teaching something about marketing, whatever is their sweet spot, whether its social media marketing or figuring out what type of marketing approach is best given a specific goal.
All the videos have a high production quality, and part of that comes from the fact that they are clearly staged, rehearsed, and scripted. You don’t get off-the-cuff remarks much less the deep and emotionally resonating thoughts that sometimes come from speaking about the meaning of one’s work or passion. If you’re looking for that type of inspiration, you can find it in MasterClass. Udacity focuses much more on skills and skills-based knowledge.
The first several videos in the Digital Marketing course had an overly corporate vibe, reiterating how a career in marketing is worthwhile and what marketing is. They get much better though, once they get into specific skills. Here, the course content is relevant, specific, and applicable. In the Digital Marketing course, for example, you learn about different online tools and methods for driving traffic to a website. You learn different ways to look at the value of a customer, and roughly how to calculate how much money a campaign should spend per customer. There’s a section on SEO that talks about off-site SEO link building. It’s the kind of education many people expect to get on the job but sometimes never do.
In auditing this class, we did not participate in submitting assignments, although they’re an extremely valuable part, not only for the learning process but also in terms of what you physically get out of a course. For example, job candidates who are expected to write code in their roles will need to show code samples, which may very well be an assignment in a relevant Nanodegree course.
Inside Udacity’s Free Courses
Udacity’s free courses run the gamut in terms of topic, length, and engagement level. A free course on cover letter writing, for example, takes maybe an hour and gives some good general tips that are useful in most fields. Another free course on writing code for security is not only longer but also more intensive.
Not all the free courses measure up to the quality and rigor of Nanodegree courses. Some don’t give an accurate representation of what’s inside the Nanodegree courses. Perhaps a better way to give potential Nanodegree students a taste would be to let them watch 30 minutes of video lectures at the midway point of a given course.
Highly Specific, Job-Focused, and Tech-Minded
Udacity’s courses are job-centric and teach highly applicable skills. If you need to learn a particular job skill, especially if it’s related to technology and computing, it’s certainly worth looking at Udacity’s Nanodegree catalog to see if it’s offered. The syllabus will even tell you if you’ll come away from the completed program with work samples to share with potential employers.
Udacity fills a niche—teaching on-the-job skills that are highly specific and mostly technical—and you shouldn’t confuse it with an accredited degree. Though the prices are a little steep, if there’s a skill you need to acquire and you want work samples to prove it, it’s definitely worth checking to see if Udacity teaches it.
