IBM's Online Courses are snoozefests and useless.

VirusDumb · January 2

IBM has been really pushing it's SkillsBuild thing online which are a bunch of online courses on a variety of technical skills, I had been seeing ADs for them all over my feed since I constantly look for online courses to learn things in Tech a lot, so I fortunately got to take 2 of their online courses on coursera for free thanks to my college paying for it through their program, and 1 course on their site for free cuz I clicked on a promo link and they were an absolute snoozefest.

The course I actually sort of "completed" was called "Python for AI, Machine Learning, Datascience" I took it because I wanted to learn to use pandas and sci kit learn, but I was surprised to find out that first few modules of the course was just the basics of Python, so I skipped through them, then I got to the other part and it was or atleast it felt like it was just some text to speech of the documentations of the libraries put over a powerpoint presentation, and it sucked, I gained nothing new from them that I wouldn't have just reading the plain documentations or watching youtube videos about them, same went with the "machine learning with python" course which was so painfully boring to watch (Just some text to speech reading powerpoint slides about regression) I gave up.

the one on their site was called "Generative AI for Software development" was even more pathetic cuz it was an actual powerpoint presentation about AI things anyone who doesn't live under a rock knows and just one lab activity which was so broken and glitchy that it required 8 refreshes to load, and was just a jupyter notebook of watsonx, their LLM teaching me how to ask it to tuern JS code into Python Code, and at the end they gave me this PNG and asked me to post that on social media with their hastag bruh nah

I don't think anyone should be paying actual money for these courses

GOTSpectrum · January 2

Well if it costs money, it's not a true MOOC is it?

SMH at IBM, MOOCs are very surface level most of the time, but they are supposed to be free, the intention was to be able to use them for entry to university if you don't have appropriate qualifications

VirusDumb · January 3

11 hours ago, GOTSpectrum said:

Well if it costs money, it's not a true MOOC is it?

SMH at IBM, MOOCs are very surface level most of the time, but they are supposed to be free, the intention was to be able to use them for entry to university if you don't have appropriate qualifications

my mistake, I messed up, Online Courses are what they're supposed to be called, but the thing is, paying money to them is a bad idea, I've seen free MOOCs that go somewhat more detailed, but these just are not only surface level but painful to sit through

I found this video about them which explains how their focus is more on consulting and teaching people how to use the things they make instead of making easy to use things, I guess these courses are a part of those business model