[Tutor] FW: Simplilearn data science

[avi.e.gross at gmail.com]

I am not clear on any RULES of etiquette here and may be violating some broader expectations, but I am forwarding a message I received in private from a third party.

 

The topic is, or was, a user with some name like Abdallah Rashid (عبدالله راشد) who wrote a short message here and, as too often happens here, then has not reappeared to respond to anything several of us wrote. In my opinion, that is a fine reason to stop discussing it as we may be talking to ourselves and it may not be a topic we are interested in.

 

But we also have seen people in many groups like this who use it for their own purposes and one such purpose can be to sort of advertise their product and hope someone tries it. As I read it, we were being asked about a platform for teaching in general, and on a specific, albeit loose, topic. No pointers to a specific web page showing what was meant were given.

 

The letter below was sent to me in what looks like a Bcc as a response to the original message. As I understand it, it suggests that the Simplilearn platform as a whole is not a great choice for the many reasons mentioned. It goes to the point of suggesting it is a fraud.

 

I, personally, am not in the market for taking courses to gain credentials, but more along the lines of just for fun and enlightenment. I have taken all kinds of courses over the years, both for free and with some kind of tuition, and have had plenty where the instructor was not a native English speaker and has had, shall we say, cultural differences. They were not all low-cost either, but often simply people who were raised and educated partially or completely in other places and were not cunning linguists. I can usually get past that as long as they also know the content well. Some can’t. But if I were to try to do lectures in one of the many human languages I have decent familiarity with, and I include the languages I spoke before English, I suspect I would not please the ones listening that much either. Then again, after a few months, in my own experience, I would adapt and probably do a passable job with less of an accent or stumbling around for words.

 

In any case, I think what Óscar  wrote below and the fact the questioner remains silent, are solid reasons for not continuing to delve into Simplilearn further here. I am fairly sure there are better ways to learn these topics but more importantly, better CREDENTIALS people can get for real jobs.

 

The reality is that many people (including many here) are largely self-taught using things as simple as textbooks and playing around writing and debugging actual programs. I came upon Python in the last decade or so and began by reading lots of books on it and internet resources and did some Coursera courses just for fun that rarely taught me anything new. I then got books more focused on doing things like Statistics or Machine Learning and so on, that had parts done using Python and packages (but also, or instead, often other languages like R). Luckily, as I have no regular day job, I do not need to care about credentials. If I was trying to make a living using python, I would try to find out about jobs and what they would accept as partial proof of eligibility, as was mentioned here. For some people a good route is to redirect their early education towards getting degrees in something like computer science that are broader than one language or discipline like data analysis. For others, especially with a shorter time-frame in mind, there may well be ways to earn decent credentials in shorter periods but those may qualify you barely enough to get in the door.

 

When I joined Bell labs, I came from a complicated background that included a Masters in Computer Science but the focus was both broad and abstract and the experience was largely in other directions than the way things were done there. I mean I had been using languages like FORTRAN and Pascal on mainframes and DEC platforms like a VAX running VMS. At the labs the languages I ended up using required learning more about C and UNIX and an assortment of tools that overlapped but largely were different. I mean different text editors and utilities and so on.

 

What qualified me for the jobs I then did was not that I could walk in on day one knowing everything but the fact I could learn anything rapidly and already knew about quite a bit of similar things and ways and so on.

 

And my job kept changing. If all I could do was one-trick, I would not have lasted. My education has continued and will continue in a world that is not static. Many of the things I once learned are now fairly useless and some arguably never were useful. Most were fun, at least for a while.

 

If a student is not able to learn easily on their own, or tries and something in the books is not clicking, sure, classes chosen carefully may be helpful. This forum is here partially for that reason as a supplement to either books or classrooms.

 

The letter from Óscar  follows. I assume he is on this forum and am not sure why he has trouble posting here. Usually a reply-all works.

 

From: O ZA <sodercan at yahoo.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2022 9:49 AM
To: avi.e.gross at gmail.com
Subject: Simplilearn data science

 

Hello

 

Sorry for having contacted you directly. I’m new to this, and I don’t know how to access your enquiry 

 

Data science is great, but Simplilearn is a horrible platform 

 

They play with dates, so that you cannot ask for a refund 

 

Their tutorials are really old, and they use low cost instructors who speak broken English and come out with chauvinistic comments 

 

There’s a Simplilearn fraud group on Facebook. Maybe you can also ask in there

 

Please, let me know which course you eventually chose

 

Good luck,

 

Óscar 


On 29/08/2022 22.03, عبدالله راشد wrote:
> Hello!
> I'm willing to have a course from SimpiLearn as  a data scientist but
> unfortunately I am not sure if is going to be a good course, I'm still new
> and don't have any experience or knowledge about data scientist.