How can you be mad at him? Did I mention he’s likable? As for the materials, the reason I wasn’t falling behind in the course was that I had already taken the excellent courses from Andrew Ng. I was more interested in the exclusive connection, referrals, and certificate!

I’ve been working on my own online course at this time, so I felt he was a bit of a kindred spirit. I know it’s damn hard to write for 3 hours just to have 10 minutes of content.

Just, so as there’s no mistake, I will NOT be linking to my course in this blog post. While I’m proud of my work, I don’t want to pollute the real message here.

So I sucked it up and continued on with our new course of action! The two groups will be merged!

The Course is Reborn!

So all our slacks got merged into a single discord of students! Siraj heard us! He’s going to fix everything! I joined the new discord chat with over a thousand others.

Points for his course branding 🤣

For me, I used this as a chance to reconnect and find new people. Siraj added some really nice TA’s and they were extremely helpful. I got to chatting on weekends with them, and I have to say I’ve met people who enriched my life there. Siraj brought people together.

But

Something was strangely quiet again. People started sharing homework answers and even making videos of answers to solve this unguided course. If you’ve ever taken a course on Coursera, things like this are pretty looked down upon. Siraj never showed up to say if it’s OK or not… and his course recordings began to slip into unedited and confusing globs.

^ That excerpt was from the actual course… not a blooper reel. This is what was shipped.

Next, we hit our biggest assignment to date, the midterm. The midterm was simple and yet terrifying with the title: “Build an AI Startup”…

Wow! If you’ve ever done a hackathon before there are all kinds of wild problems with “who owns what?” and scope of work. The midterm instructions were a bit chaotic. Keep in mind, we’ve been taught to search for code, and a lot of students are still trying to grasp basics of Web much less AI. Quite a few desperate students filled the midterm chat asking for direction. I helped where I could.

I don’t know how many people successfully formed a team and accomplished this, but I can tell you I saw a lot of people fighting to keep partners, organize concepts, and actually deliver this mid-term (was 2 weeks but got extended to 3 weeks). I’m sure a lot of people worked very hard because I spent a significant amount of time working on my midterm in time to have it done, all while seeing people make posts like these:

I tried jumping in and helping a few people. I even did a Zoom call with a fellow student to help him get caught up on his homework. Maybe we didn’t start with 500, but people were dropping left and right. The weekly live-stream count was dropping and dropping … and then it happened.

The Straw that Broke Me

FINALLY, I had caught up on finishing the mid-term, I had finished the two weeks of homework I fell behind, and the people I’d helped were on track to catch up. All the while, I’ve got a major deliverable at my full-time job.

And then I saw this:

Wait… did Siraj copy and paste his course content from this blog article? No… it’s worse… he changed it just enough so that no one would catch him.