A recent Udacity blog post asks its readers to describe what motivates them to complete online courses. I’ve completed four of these courses now so I should be in a good position to describe my motivation.

I take these courses for two reasons: to hopefully make myself a better job candidate and to learn cool new stuff from really experienced people.

I don’t have a formal computer science education so Stanford’s AI Class and Udacity’s How to Program a Robotic Car were good (and free) opportunities to learn about topics like search, planning, and filters. I expanded my vocabulary with things like A-star and breadth first search, Kalman and particle filters, and dynamic programming. How to Program a Robotic Car even had us writing programs using these topics, which I found to be a big help in learning them.

Another area I don’t have much experience with is web programming so I took Udacity’s Web Application Engineering with Steve Huffman. It was a fun and practical course. I learned about HTTP requests and responses, cookies, tracking, securely storing passwords, databases, cacheing, and more. I made a functioning web application with Google App Engine.

I didn’t have any trouble staying motivated to finish the courses. I found the material interesting enough that I was always looking forward to the next class. I love the digital certificate I get at the end. (I put them on Dropbox so I can link to them from my résumé.) One advantage I had in the Udacity courses is that I’m already a Python programmer so I could focus entirely on the content of the courses without the language getting in the way. (The instructors of How to Program a Robotic Car went out of their way to make their code as un-Pythonic as possible, though. I think to make it a bit less intimidating to people coming from other languages.)

The Udacity folks have been experimenting with classes with and without deadlines. The current MO seems to be to have deadlines the first time a course is offered and then leave the same material up and offer the class without deadlines thereafter. (The final is still scheduled with a deadline.) I think my wife really likes the deadlines and schedules because it means I can only spend so much time on a class in one week and I can point to a definite point in the future when the class will be done. Left to my own devices I would probably try to finish these courses in one short burst. I also feel like the deadlines prevent me from indefinitely putting the courses off.

Whether these courses will help me the next time I go looking for a job remains to be seen. Udacity is starting to open up info on its students to companies looking to hire but I doubt I will stand out from the other computing industry professionals taking these courses (and judging from the forums there seem to be a lot of them). I can say, though, that I’ve learned a lot and enjoyed doing it. Next up: Software Testing: How to Make Software Fail.