Well marketed but course not up to expectations. Review on Great Learning

Thanks Greatlearning for giving us opprtunity to write reviews & let other enthusiasts know upfront what they are going to enrol for.

I have enrolled for their PGP AIML Weekend Classrom batch for Mumbai. It has been just above 3 months & one third course completed so far.

I will summarize first as it's the long review about my experience so far.

Faculty: Only some of the prominent professors they show on their website turn up for actual classes. None from Mumbai University or Texas Austin University so far. There have been cases when after we raised concerns they had to keep remedial sessions by another professor to cover up the not so good session by ordinary Teaching academy professor.

Curriculum: Curriculum is good, in-depth & better than Stanford's University Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng by Coursera but not very well planned.

Mentorship: Have only come across some often repeated ones during 4-hr Lab sessions on Sundays which often get over by 2 - 3 hours & the mentors more or less guide you if you get stuck up somewhere during the Lab session.

Assignments:Assignments are not very well planned, datasets are often miniscule having not more than few 100s of records & they have to sometimes edit the question set as they realize that they release assignments also for not yet covered topics in the class. Overall, we have Internal Lab, External Lab & Quiz every 4 weeks. Sometimes, it gets too much alongwith couple of Projects too to be submitted in 4 weeks which is bit tough for working professionals but it keeps you going with lots of practice & hands-on exercise which is good. But, they are graded quite leniently & often half the class scores full marks or at max loose 1 or 2 marks.

Projects: As I said we have couple of projects every 4 weeks. Again the datasets are not having more than few 100s of records & sometimes there are repetitive datasets too. Overall projects are good exercise of what we learnt during past residencies & some projects also have topics from multiple courses which is good. It feels nice to see project completion put up in ePortfolio mentioning skills learnt. But, again the projects are also graded very leniently & often half the class scores full marks or at max loose 1 or 2 marks.

Peer interaction: We have a class of 42 very diverse students in the batch, Diverse in experience ranging from 0 to 20 years of experience & from multiple domains, some coming from programming background & some not. It sometimes becomes very difficult for the professors to manage the course & keep everyone on same page as with the vastly diverse audience like us, some pick up concepts very quickly & some of us struggle to keep the pace. Overall, it's difficult to do justice to all which this kind of diverse batch. We have made an unofficial Whatsapp group which helps us interact & know each other & sometimes it also helps some of us to move ahead in Projects & Assignments & also discuss matters concerning poor quality of the Courses.

General feedback:

What I have witnessed so far is that I can see lot of efforts of management going towards marketing but they don't focus equally on maintaining the quality levels that the amount of course fees & marketing demands.

The invitation to it's students to write reviews about thier Course is one such marketing effort but I think writing is on the wall for them to see & improve focus on the course curicullum rather than focus too much on marketting.

First thing is they call it a Weekend classroom batch but out of 12 weekends, that includes Saturday & Sunday with a gap of 4 weeks between each residency, there are classes on alternate Fridays scheduled as well after every 8 weeks.

As usual, marketed as weekend classroom batch but you come to know about this ugly fact only after you enrol for the admission.

And their location of Ramada Hotel for Mumbai makes the Friday experience worst as it takes almost couple of hours to cover the distance of 20 odd kms from both eastern & western suburbs of Mumbai as the place is only approachable by road.

After our feedbacks, they considered moving it to Hotel Mirador during third residency which was at least approachable by Metro but the venue wasn't fit for classroom sessions & almost everyone of us voted to shift back to Ramada when we were given a choice to choose betwwen the 2 locations after the third residency.

At the beginning, we had lot of concerns which were mainly due to fresher Program Manager which managed courses for our batch very poorly & often made lot of goof ups which created lot of frustrations amongst us because of not so good quality of Professors taking the course.

But, management was all ears to our concerns & acted quickly when required. With the help of management, we have been able to get the inexperienced Program Manager replaced & we also managed to convince them to keep remedial session to address our concerns regarding poor quality of courses taken by reputed Professors & they also acted upon our demands to change the venue but unfortunately the venue we had moved was not designed for classroom sessions. One of the management person also visited us during our third residency to address all our concerns & take some corrective actions & now things have started falling in place slowly.

The online learning platform of theirs needs lot of improvement & I had also given some suggestions to them to make some improvements to which they had promised to incorporate by end of October 2019. But, at the time of writing this review, there have been no changes yet & no word from the management yet on their explanation for the delay.

Overall, the quality is not as expected as compared to the Course Fees they demand. But, since the curicullum is good, I believe it should be beneficial for me to make successful transition to this trending Technology.