Thank you Raymond !!!
You’re right that if they published the templates of the assignments, that’s not an avenue for students to cheat. But they’ve also had problems with people pirating the course materials and creating their own “for profit” DL courses. There are lots of ways to be dishonest unfortunately. It’s a big world out there and enforcing copyright laws is hard enough just in the US jurisdiction, but it’s hopeless if you look at it globally.
The fundamental business model is that they are selling access to the graded assignments, which is how you get that valued “certificate”. It’s not fine print: it’s totally “in your face” when you start the courses, right? Remember the whole “7 day free trial” thing? Now maybe they could show you the assignments, but disable the grader without subscription. But they (DeepLearning.AI) are at the mercy of how the Coursera course mechanisms work and maybe that’s tricky to do. I have no knowledge of how any of those platform mechanisms work.
I have not explored all of Coursera, so I don’t know if the policy of showing the lectures for free, but charging for the assignments, is common or not. Maybe there are courses where you have to pay even to see the lectures and it’s just that Andrew is a very mission driven person whose goal is to share knowledge as widely as possible.
What I was saying is in the fine print is that any labs - even the ungraded sample code that you just look at and run - is not available once you complete the subscription. That detail and the one where you cannot even pay to continue having access to the full range of materials even if you want to, those are the aspects of this that I was referring to with that statement, and if that was in my face, I must have been half-asleep studying before my first coffee that day haha
There are two worlds within Coursera. Everything on Coursera Plus is, as far as I can tell, fully accessible to you as long as you are a subscriber. Specializations like these from DeepLearning.AI that are not in the Plus subscription require a separate monthly payment (after the 7 day trial), and this is the first time I have paid for a specialization outside of Plus that I cared enough to go back to. Hence only just now finding that Coursera turns off the lights in this way.
I completely agree that this kind of feature might be difficult for them to implement, even though similar stuff stays available for Coursera Plus offerings, the mechanics behind the scenes absolutely could be at play.
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I found a few repositories on github that contain the optional labs. You will find them if you search Machine learning specialization.
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Please note that it is a violation of the Terms of Use of these courses to publish any of the assignments in a GitHub account unless that account is private to you. The material is copyrighted by DeepLearning.AI and is licensed to you for own personal use only. If you upload it to a publicly searchable GitHub account, you have published it to the whole world, which you do not have the right to do.
That said, the Internet is a big place and there is probably no realistic way to enforce any of these rules. So use your own conscience about what you do here.
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All of the course materials are downloadeble while you take the courses. I suspect that after some time you will be able to retake the course or signup for the all you can learn plan they have for a flat fee per year or month.
FYI, I was able to get access to the labs again for 7 days by going through support. Took about a week so it requires patience.
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I am experiencing the same thing. Glad to see this discussion thread. Thanks, everyone!
Hi Darren and Erika. I shared this feedback with our contact in Coursera and she’s coordinating with their Learner Support Team. If your request for a few days extension is rejected (unlike David’s), please let me know so we can investigate. We’re also asking for clarity regarding this platform policy so we can have a note about it in our courses. Thanks!
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Hi Chris, thanks a lot for taking the time to help sort things out for us! My situation is that I realized such issue during the last series of the specialization (unsupervised learning), so I was able to save my codes. I’m not sure if Coursera would approve my request to extend course for the first two (supervised learning & advanced learning); I’ll try requesting first, and update here if I get rejections.
Sounds good. Thank you!
I’m in the same pickle —I have finished the whole course-and had to purchase for the course again. Even then, when Paul suggested to download all the files for the labs and I even installed Jupyter through pip, and open the notebook—they still show incompleteness, ie missing images, graphs animations that are part of the lab.
I have also opened the notebooks through juypter lite—which seems like juypyter’s online version, and, still it was the same. My guess is that these files are within cousera’s cloud.
Learning isn’t a one time event, you have to review the material, but if the material is again locked when you paid for it initially—it’s disappointing. I understand intellectual property/copyrights etc, but now I don’t know what to do. Any assistance would be highly appreciated.
Hi Erika. Would just like to clarify this part:
My situation is that I realized such issue during the last series of the specialization (unsupervised learning), so I was able to save my codes. I’m not sure if Coursera would approve my request to extend course for the first two (supervised learning & advanced learning);
Did you mean the labs in Courses 1 and 2 were already locked when you were taking Course 3? Or you just didn’t get a chance to check before your subscription expired? Thanks!
Hi Ryan. I’m sorry to hear that. Coursera has acknowledged the feedback on this thread, and has relayed it to their product team for future consideration. In the meantime, we’ll be adding a note in our courses to inform learners about this platform policy.
As for running the labs locally, I suggest creating a separate topic to make it more visible to mentors/learners who might be able to help.
Thank you!
Hi Chris, apologies for the late reply. I didn’t get a chance to check Course 1 and 2 when my subscription expired. Hope this helps. Let me know if you need further clarification