| | Elizabeth | I recently completed the Foundations of Data Science course. It took me a little less than 3 months to complete the curriculum and capstone project.
The best part about Springboard is the mentoring. I loved my mentor--she was extremely generous with her time and knowledge and her interests and mine aligned very well. She was always quick to respond and really encouraged me to push forward with coding and analytics that I felt usure about. I really miss my mentor!
I came to Springboard with no coding background , but with a graduate degree and some knowledge of statistics. Springboard does not make ANY of their own curriculum and they don't craft any tie-ins or connections between the different lessons. A large part of the curriculum is based off of Data Camp to learn R. Learning through Data Camp has it's own set of challenges and none of these are addressed by Springboard. Other components of the course include the EdX Analytics series and dplyr videos through Data School. Many of these resources are good on their own, but none is complete enough to give the student (or at least one w/o a coding background) sufficient foundation to tackle the assignments. Often the assignments are so disconnected from the curriculum, that they are difficult to complete w/o help for your mentor--which is OK to a degree, but given that each mentor session is 30 minutes--often time runs out before addressing the capstone and other project concerns. I really feel that more attention should be paid to the curriculum---it is certainly OK to use resources from other sites, but there should be reinforcement of key concepts like..writing functions...through either supplemental videos created by Springboard, or focus lessons during the office hours.
With regard to job assistance--there is none and the career materials provided, again are brief You Tube video clips or books that are not presented in any kind of way to give the student a view of the field, options for careers or even guidance in terms of moving forward with skills, once one completes the course. In fact, after completing the course, there is zero follow up or transition. I never received any certificate or any kind of "next steps if you want to keep learning" email. Once I finished and got my rubric from my mentor (and stopped paying the monthly fee), Springboard went off the radar. |
