Learning Tools vs Learning the Craft
This is the second in a series of essays about my experience with the largest data science and programming MOOC in the world—the IIT Madras Degree Programme in Data Science and Applications. The first essay was about learning and practicing programming, and can be read here.
Four years ago, as a part of the data science diploma, I took the Machine Learning Practice course. It had two OPPEs—online proctored programming exams—worth nearly half of the course grade. We were given a list of questions, most of which were numericals, i.e. you needed to type in a number in the answer field. There was a link to a dataset, and a Google colab notebook. While the score depended almost entirely on the answer, the notebook, too, needed to be submitted as a buffer.