I love studying, whenever I have free time I try to learn something new.
I am familiar with Udemy already, they have some sales where we can find some very cheap courses. Of course, the quality is not very high on every course, but if you want to take learning as a hobbie that is ok.
I am ok with paying 10 bucks for a course that is meh... Not very good, not bad though, but I have the mindset that ALL COURSES THERE are pretty much introductory, even the ones that promisse to land you a job.
On the end of last year I wanted to try something a little bit different though, I wanted to see how Udacity is different from Udemy, because the Udacity courses are LITERALLY 100x more expensive, and they say they have connections with profissionals from the market an CV review etc...
So, I have enrolled on the fullstack web developer course for around 2 months already and I do have an opinion on Udacity...
IT SUCKS!
Udacity has more exercises and more practice than most Udemy courses, but their classes are full of bells and whistles. Imagine a programming course where the teacher does not code along with you. They use drawings, they abuse the use of images and mental maps and all of that is distracting!!!
Look, I make written tutorials on my profile and I prefer to read tutorials instead of watching because I can jump right where I think is the part I am interested, in the case of video tutorials I like when the teacher codes along and give many examples of how to do something, on Udacity I have none of that!
The teacher gives one example on an image and that is it, then you have to search all you want on Google/Youtube, and it is ok to search, working as a developer means knowing how to search, but when the whole course requires you to search everything because the course refuses to teach you as an adult we have a problem.
The whole "nanodegree" looks like a programming class for kids, with little to no code and tons of images, drawings and mental maps!
Not to say the dead links, dead links everywhere pointing to documentation that does not exist anymore, and believe me, they still teach Python 2, which in less than 1 year will be discontinued and people have been transitioning to Python 3 for over 1 year already to get the new long time support version! They haven't updated the course for around 2 to 3 years!!! Their website is a money printing machine that apparently does not require extra work from them.
I have saw people criticizing Udemy because they treat courses as a product, not as knowledge, and that courses are too cheap making knowledge less valuable and reducing quality, but this is the internet! We have free knowledge everywhere!
I am not saying Udemy is perfect, but for 10 bucks, heck, they have all the right to be a simple and introductory course, if I want to dig deeper I can Google
But a 1000 bucks course that callls itself a "nanodegree" have such a low quality, dead links, childish approach and old tutorials, that is unacceptable!
In my experience, everything on Udemy is very introductory, but the courses I have taken have been great. As with most online learning, the responsibility falls on you to stick with it and make sure you understand the instructor before moving forward.
I dont think I would trust the "nanodegrees" that udacity is giving out, but I've also heard people using the knowledge they learn from the nanodegrees as a more lateral move in careers to a similar field rather than learning an entirely new topic.