Find the right nanodegree program for you.
The Udacity-Google partnership is one of the most valuable assets we provide to our students. Some of our most successful and impactful Nanodegree programs were built with Google, including our Machine Learning Engineer and Android Developer programs. Some of our most successful student events have involved Google, including Intersect 2016 and the Android Developer Career Summit. And some of our most outstanding new courses feature subject-matter experts from Google.
Speaking of new courses with Google, I’d like to introduce you to seven of them, all of which are… wait for it … wait for it … free!
You read that right, all of this value, at no cost to you! Now, some of these courses are PART of a Nanodegree program, but they’re also accessible for free. We’re going to take a closer look at each of these courses, but just in case you’re ready to jump in and start learning right now, here’s the linked list:
Get Your Startup Started
Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes
Monetize Your Android App with Ads
A/B Testing
Web Tooling & Automation
Building High Conversion Web Forms
Offline Web Applications
Get Your Startup Started
We had some great talent involved in the creation of this course. Matt Kaufman, Head of Operations at CrunchBase, recently penned a post on our blog about his involvement, and I heartily encourage you to read it, as he shares some great insights about launching and maintaining a successful startup.
The course itself is co-taught by our own Joe Nyzio, and Shanea King-Roberson. Shanea is a Program Manager at Google, and she’s also our partner for managing the Udacity Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree program. This course is in fact part of the Tech Entrepreneur program, but it’s also available as a free course.
In addition to Joe and Shanea, the course curriculum features contributions from a literal who’s who of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Gil Ben-Artzy, Co-Founder of UpWest Labs, Gigi Levy-Weiss, Founding Partner of NFX Guild, Noam Schwartz of SimilarWeb, and Krispy Uccello of Google.
There are literally hundreds of students already taking this course, each of whom is learning how to pitch their business and secure the funding they’ll need to launch their new company!
Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes
Carter Morgan, Developer Platforms Engineer at Google, and one of the instructors of this course, just announced “Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes” during his recent talk at Google I/0, which we were of course thrilled about, as not only is it an amazing course, but it will also be part of our soon-to-be-launched DevOps Engineer Nanodegree program!
Carter also wrote a fantastic blog post on the course, which you can read here.
The course curriculum is designed to teach you about managing application containers using Kubernetes, and students will learn to:
- Containerize an application by creating Docker config files and build processes to produce all the necessary Docker images
- Configure and launch an auto-scaling, self-healing Kubernetes cluster
- Use Kubernetes to manage deploying, scaling, and updating your applications
- Employ best practices for using containers in general, and specifically Kubernetes, when architecting and developing new microservices
To quote Carter himself, “Ultimately, the goal of this course is to give you the tools needed to get hired managing scalable microservices in production.”
Monetize Your Android App with Ads
This course is part of what we call our Google Play Services series, which features a variety of different Google APIs. These course are designed to be standalone (though they can certainly be taken together as a group), and are not affiliated with any particularly Nanodegree program. They’re extremely popular, and there are currently nearly 6000 students currently enrolled in Monetize Your Android App with Ads. Other courses in the series include:
This course features a trio of notable instructors who come to us from the Google ranks: Developer Advocates Laurence Moroney and Magnus Hyttsten, as well as Jocelyn Becker, who actually wrote the developer documentation for the very first external Google API, the Adwords API, back in 2004!
A/B Testing
This course is a fantastic example of just how rich our Google talent pool is, and how beneficial the Udacity-Google partnership is for our students. The course is taught by Carrie Grimes Bostock, who is currently a Distinguished Engineer at Google, Diane Tang, a Google Fellow who was highlighted by Business Insider as one of The 21 Most Important Googlers You’ve Never Heard Of, and Caroline Buckey, who at the time the course was built worked for Udacity, but who has since joined Google as a Software Engineer!
The subject of the course is self-evident from the title—it focuses on the design and analysis of A/B tests—and students in the course leverage their knowledge of descriptive and inferential statistics to learn how to design good A/B tests and draw valid conclusions from their experiments. The course is comprised of 5 lessons and a final project:
Lesson 1: Overview of A/B Testing
Lesson 2: Policy and Ethics for Experiments
Lesson 3: Choosing and Characterizing Metrics
Lesson 4: Designing an Experiment
Lesson 5: Analyzing Results
Final Project: Design and Analyze an A/B Test
Web Tooling & Automation
This course is one of three web development courses that we’re highlighting in this post, all of which are built with Google, and all of which have become very popular offerings. There are currently over 11,000 students collectively enrolled across these three courses!
This course is co-taught by Paul Bakaus, a Developer Advocate at Google currently heading up advocacy and outreach for DevTools, AMP and Games, and our own James Williams, who in addition to being a Senior Content Developer at Udacity is also the author of Learning HTML5 Game Programming.
The “Why Take This Course” module on the course overview page pretty delightfully lays out the value proposition:
Front-end developers need to work quickly and efficiently to be productive. Having a good set of tools and libraries is crucial. This course will introduce you to a opinionated set of tools and libraries to improve your workflow.
Building High Conversion Web Forms
If at first glance this doesn’t sound like the most exciting of topics, one glance at the subheader on the course overview page should make clear that passions actually run quite high on this subject:
Forms Rock! That’s pretty much the mantra for this great new offering, and in addition to our own rock star instructor Cameron Pittman, the course features the talents of Ido Green (Developer Advocate at Google, and the author of Web Workers: Multithreaded Programs in JavaScript), and Luke Wroblewski, Google Product Director and author of Web Form Design, who is interviewed at length for the course.
Virtually all meaningful experience on the web have a form, and this course is an excellent way to learn best practices for creating them.
Offline Web Applications
As Michael Wales, our instructor for this course, says, if you take this course, you’ll be “a master of the cache!” The focus here is entirely on user experience, and the goal is to teach students how to build applications that look and feel good ALL the time—not just in the best of cases.
The course is comprised of 3 lessons:
Lesson 1: The Benefits of Offline First
Lesson 2: Introducing the Service Worker
Lesson 3: IndexedDB and Caching
and a project:
PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION APP
You will build an application that allows users to select a departure and arrival train station, and see a list of trains, times, and durations. A default train schedule will be provided that should be used when the application is offline. If a network connection exists, the application will query an endpoint that provides information about all arrival and departure times.
To enroll, students should first be proficient in HTML and CSS, and have experience creating web apps.
Conclusion
Our partnership with Google has produced a wealth of learning opportunities for our students. No matter whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or advanced learner, or whether you’re interested in Android, Tech Entrepreneurship, Cloud Computing, Web Development, Data Science, or Deep Learning with TensorFlow, there is something here for just about everyone. With so many of these outstanding courses being made available for free, there’s no reason not to try one today, so we invite you to experience Udacity and Google together by enrolling in one of the courses we’ve profiled above.
When you’re ready to commit to a full-immersion, career-focused learning experience that will significantly and positively impact your career trajectory, consider enrolling in one of the Nanodegree programs we’ve built in partnership with Google:
And stay tuned for launch announcements for two NEW Udacity-Google Nanodegree programs!
Beginning Android App Development
See you in the classroom!
