My experience with Applied AI course

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5 min read

AI, ML, DL, NLP … are the high voltage topics currently in the tech market. Because of the overly hyped and a lot of job openings people wanted to get involved in these cool fancy fields. Anything you pick up from the market, companies claim in some way it's connected to any one of the above terms because it helps in attracting customers.

In fear of not missing the bus and to stay relevant in dynamic job market people want to jump into these new fields and yes good money also a strong attraction. But its not that easy as it looks from outside or from the plethora of promotional videos you must have received from various institutions that claims to get you into these fields especially if you are trying to do a mid career switch.

There are a lot of training programs available online and offline that claim to enable you to land your dream job. Some of them are very good and some not. With a large number of options comes big confusion.

Today I will briefly discuss one of the online course that I took and its pros and cons from my personal point of view.

On Feb 2020 at the beginning of Covid pandemic I had registered myself on Applied AI online course which provides various courses on software engineering but machine learning is their flagship product. Before joining I did some basic research and mostly got the positive reviews and main attractive selling point was their compelling pricing. The course fee is 25K Rupees + GST ,so in total you will get 1 year of subscription in 30K with EMI facilities.

All the materials are prerecorded and divided into modules. Total 130+ hours of video content available and each weekend there will be a live session on trending topics. The course covered almost everything on fundamentals of machine learning and a good portion on deep learning too. Realistically it's not possible to cover everything as the field is very dynamic and each month some new inventions coming. Here I have listed things I liked and disliked or can be improved from my personal point of view to the course

Things I liked about the course

  • Trainer is highly experienced and has a very deep understanding on the topic. He is more interested in explaining the things than you want to learn.

  • Modules are well designed & sequencing is perfect.

  • I think this is one of those small groups of courses you will find on the internet where the underlying math of the algorithms is explained to a good extent. For any doubt you can post a comment or send an email and you will get a guaranteed reply within 24 hours.

  • 30 Assignments you have to complete including 2 blog writings and for each assignment you will find a dedicated video explanation what is the problem and what outcomes they are expecting from you.

  • They provide job guarantee but with a caveat.

Things I don't like or want to be improved/added to course

  • I found most of the videos are lengthy. My personal understanding is like anything goes beyond 20 mins people start losing focus. Video can be split into 15 mins clips, That will improve efficiency but again its my personal expectation and people out their may have capacities to complete 60mins content on a single sit.
  • Subscription is only for 1 year. After a year you will lose your access to content and also not eligible for guaranteed placement program. Although a year is enough to complete the course, for working professionals it's not always possible to complete the course & assignments on time. People may not be able to give their time on a regular basis due to various reasons or some may take more time to understand the topic and complete the assignments.

  • I personally found assignments intriguing but hard. Most assignments are based on real time problems for which you have to process big data sets and it takes lots of computing resources. Yes you can take help of google Collab but its not reliable and timeout will make you rerun things. It's better to have a decent desktop/laptop.

  • Although it has a dedicated module to teach basic python programs, I don't feel its enough to enable someone coming from non coding background to get started. My suggestion will be first get good hands on python before subscribing the course. I always feel code along projects are a great way of teaching various frameworks and their implementations which the course is missing.

130+ hours of content + weekend sessions + Assignments and extra studies. The entire process is exhaustive. You need a year of time to complete it. You have to find your strategy that suits you. Some people first just consume the content, take notes and while doing assignments revisit the content .I have seen students directly jump into assignments and try to figure out concepts while watching corresponding video content. Its totally up to you what way you are able to grasp the content.

If you're a student or just a fresher you can take this course, the placement this course offers is a good way to start your career in Data Science/AI/ML engineer. But if you are a working professional with 5+ experience, the packages these company will offer will be significantly less because most of them are startups, so you have to think on that before getting into it.

My recommendation is for college students or those who just started their career ,absolutely go for this course and those who are currently working and want to change their career into AI/ML field can sign in to it but do some thinking on spending time and job opportunities provided by the course.

Hope it will help people there who are looking for some guidance. You can get a lot more details on courses from their website. Thank you, signing off for the day.