I have taken Andrew Ng’s machine learning course on Coursera last year and signed up immediately for his new deep learning specialization after it was out. Andrew Ng is such an amazing instructor and I think anyone could benefit from his MOOC.
In this post, I want to share with you 3 things I love the most about this specialization and 3 tips to help you conquer this specialization yourself.
Practical Advice
Unlike Dr. Ng’s machine learning course, the deep learning specialization covers not only concepts but also practical experiences and suggestions. Learning the concepts and different models is relatively easy compared to knowing what model or what activation function or the number of hidden units or deep learning architecture to use. There are not a lot of guidelines for building a “best” model yet and I really appreciate that Dr. Ng talked a lot about some choices people will make or rule of thumb from his own experience.
Guided Programming Homework
The programming homework is very well designed to guide you through implementing deep learning models. The homework assignments were set up to focus on the model algorithms with programming tips, thus very friendly to people without a lot of Python experience or simply want to focus on understanding the models better.
Medium Workload
Although there are 5 courses in total, the course workload is not very heavy. I can imagine most people to be able to fit this course into their schedule without feeling burned out.
Now comes to my 3 tips to help you make the most out of this specialization.
Tip 1 — Take the Quiz Before Watching the Lecture Videos
There will be1 or 2 quizzes every week and they are designed to be straightforward. You would probably get most of them right if you just finished the videos. Instead of using them to test your short-term memory, I find it more helpful to do the quiz beforehand to get a glimpse of what will be covered in that week, what I already know and what I don’t know yet so I can be more targeted when watching the lecture videos.
Tip 2 — Whiteboard What You Remember
It’s very easy to fall into the illusion that you have learned something just because you watched a video, which is, in my opinion, the biggest challenge for online learning. Besides doing the coding assignments, trying to recall the algorithms without referring to my notes helped me a lot to evaluate how much I have actually learned.
Tip 3 — Buy the Certificate
I always purchase MOOC certificates because I get more motivation to finish the course to get the trophy certification and brag about it on LinkedIn.
Thanks for reading this article. Please comment and tell me what you think about this specialization. Have fun learning!
