I have completed the whole specialization and am going back through the material, only to find that Coursera locks down all labs (even the optional ones) and that’s absolutely 100% the most valuable portion of the courses in my experience. Since Coursera does not even allow you to choose to pay them more subscription fees to have access again once you have completed the course, I am wondering if DeepLearning.AI itself has any other way of sharing these materials with those who have successfully completed the course?
We have access to the videos so I don’t see why we don’t have access to all course materials. The code that we were guided through in the labs is such a critical part of this continuing education and I am really bummed and disappointed that this is cut off. I can see that I saved some of the files but honestly it’s so much more convenient having the content organized within the course and I am pretty sure I don’t have all of the files. An oversight I won’t make again, but I can’t even find where there was any warning that access would be cut off.
I was able to chat with someone who basically said this is how things work, they lock down labs and assignments so that you can’t view them anymore. Your subscription is automatically cancelled when you complete a specialization, and they do not allow any way for you to re-subscribe. Then the big shocker was that not only is there no way to access or even pay for access, but there is no option or venue to make a request. Again, just so disappointing. Because I was specifically trying to get through two specializations and go back through the code to study again later, personal life stuff came up, now I’m locked out. Feels like a cost rather than reward of being a paying customer who completes the course.
Some other courses have code from the course hosted on GitHub or other external sources so I guess I was just hoping this exists for the DeepLearning.AI courses and I am just bad at finding it.
from what I remember if you have taken a paid course, you get access to the course materials for at least 6 months minimum and as you said you were ready to pay for resubscription, they should have allowed you. and yes one needs to save all the materials as they take a course as courses get keep updating.
I can understand your concern and disappointment. I would suggest you to raise concern again with proper description of your course done, how much payment done and ask why the access is denied immediately after course completion.
Darren are you telling about course material means the assignments you have done are not there??
Then you need to understand while you were doing the assignment and if you didn’t save the copy, your work doesn’t get saved and that is why at the beginning of every assignment they explain first to save a copy of the notebook and then do your assignment and before submitting make sure to save your work.
Perhaps there is a misunderstanding here. I am aware of what you are referring to, and it says this in a section marked (Optional): “This course uses Coursera Labs to provide a notebook environment and to grade your work. There might be some instances where you need to download your notebooks or you wish to download your entire workspace or refresh your workspace to start from scratch. This reading item outlines the steps to do so.”
This is saying that you may want to have a copy of the assignment code from the point before you start the assignment so that you can start over.
My issue is completely different. I do not see any warning that says you need to save a copy (especially of code after you have completed the assignment) because when you finish the specialization you will not be able to access or view any of the sample code from labs, any of the assignments, your own completed submissions, none of that.
You said: “I hope you do not have concern with this?” I think this is another misunderstanding. While I am disappointed in Coursera and feel upset that I was planning to circle back to the course and study the code especially, I would not say that I am coming to this forum with a “concern”. I’m coming with a request / inquiry about whether there is some other source for this valuable educational material because I think it would benefit me a lot which likely means it would benefit others, as well. Alternatively, to help others in the future if there is no way to help me, maybe it would be best to add a clear warning on the page mentioned above about downloading the completed assignment at the end, noting in particular that Coursera will give you no way - not even allowing you to pay money to extend your subscription - after you have successfully completed the specialization.
To be clear, when you go to an optional lab page or programming assignment page, there is no “Work In Browser” button to open up the code editor. There is no text on the page at all, just an emoji of a padlock.
Yeah, I’m in the same boat as Darren, and my interpretation of the instructions was the same as his. Nowhere did a see a warning that you have to download the notebooks as they will be permanently withheld from you after you complete the specialization. It was more like a gentle suggestion that if you want to explore the notebooks further for you own interest, here’s how you download them.
I am sorry I just checked for Machine learning specialisation reading instructions are not given, but DLS specialisation and other courses it is given. You have raised a good concern.
Something like this is not available for MLS specialisation.
Also just a suggestion, even I had not saved my work when I was doing some of the courses and then I lost the assignment work done by me, so for few assignments I went back and again did the assignment but didn’t submit the assignment and only saved the copy but I ran all the cell if my assignment work was done properly.
Perhaps you can try that if you really want to save your work. I know it is time consuming, but take it as a revision of your work done again and you will become stronger in MLS Specialisation.
I just want to clarify the experience we (or at least I) am seeing. I last paid for MLS on 5/21, and now just shy of 3 months later, this is what I see when I try to access the lab, and there does not appear to be any way to undo that judging by Darren’s comments, although I am going to keep trying with support.
When they automatically unsubscribe you, there is literally nothing that you can click on, there is no backtracking, there is no clean copy of the code from before you start the assignment, nothing. And there was no warning that there would be such a cutoff, even the information that the Coursera help rep gave me did not mention the labs going ghost - it only described that the cancellation for your subscription will be automatic, not even saying (iirc) that you can’t opt back in.
Checking my saved files, I actually did save every assignment from the Deep Learning specialization (@paulinpaloalto thanks for digging that up - though I wish that info were in the course not just these threads because I am sure most, like me, only come here with specific questions). Maybe that will just have to suffice - everything that’s in the ML specialization that’s not in the DL specialization I theoretically know from my experience with a stats-heavy master’s degree, credential as an actuary, work experience, lol (except that I didn’t use Python in those settings!).
So for my original question, then, it’s safe to say that DeepLearning.AI does not have any repository and does not at all make available the code for people who have completed the courses? Do you think that’s something that could be reconsidered? To be clear, I only care because I felt like the quality of the programming assignments was exceptional compared to other data science courses on Coursera, so it’s a compliment.
But the point is that the assignments and the quizzes are behind the paywall, right? So perhaps they thought it was pretty obvious that you’d lose access to them when your subscription is no longer active. The only surprising and counterintuitive thing is that they won’t let you “re-up” your subscription to regain access. That would be more revenue for them, so it seems odd they would disallow that.
One rationale I can think of is that they probably figured that if a student reactivates their subscription that they would expect to find their notebooks in the state that they left them. But that would impose a large cost on Coursera, because they’d have to maintain the state of every student’s files who ever subscribed to any course until the Sun goes super nova. What they probably do when they cancel your subscription is vaporize any file state you created.
No, that does not exist and I don’t think there is any reasonable possibility that such a thing will ever be created. The reason is that not everyone is as honest as you probably are, Darren. If there were officially published solutions, they’d be on GitHub before you could say “Bob’s your Uncle” and then it just enables cheating. Mind you, there are plenty of people who have (in violation of the Terms of Use) put up their own personal solutions on GitHub. But it would be that much worse if there were “official” solutions published in that way, even if they were published in violation of the rules.
I can understand that response, and figured that it was a shot in the dark, but I had to check because of the value of the materials. There are courses / specializations out there that post a lot of their materials (including, I recall, code) themselves on GitHub so it did seem like there’s some possibility. Of course, nobody posts solutions to graded assignments, but at least stuff that’s equivalent to the ungraded labs in these courses. And I did assume that if anything, there might be a repository with the assignments without solutions (so with a bunch of ‘None’ where the user is supposed to put in code to complete the assignment) - I definitely would not expect a ‘solution manual’ of any kind to ever be made available outside of some employees / mentors.
Perhaps I am not thinking of this the right way, but that doesn’t seem it would create any new avenue for cheating. Since anyone working on the course is staring at that exact same code when they start their assignment, looking at the same thing on e.g. GitHub on one screen and Coursera on another doesn’t create any advantage. But I won’t make any demands or say that DeepLearning.AI is being unreasonable - just to be clear, I’m not here to complain, just to inquire about something, and then on points like this I’m just discussing further out of interest!
Lastly, also just from curiosity / interest - Coursera allows those who have successfully completed the specialization to still see videos and readings, and it must be in some fine print somewhere that other materials disappear. If they are allowing access to some of the materials, I assumed (wrongly) that they would allow for anything that’s beneficial for education to still be up, because this is a subject that most people are going to need to circle back to and really study in order to fully internalize. Maybe the market is mostly people who want to get a badge and move on.
