Nuclio School

It is so difficult to find a course where 80% can be based on "learning by doing" and applied with every class, video, teacher. NDS is not an exception here or at least, with their digital product management course. 

NDS must read deeply every feedback from their lovely students. I am very sure they will and then, they will overcome every challenge. For now, they need to understand that students can get bored if they just have to watch videos one by one. Also, they can get bored if teachers just focus on presenting slides with contented easily founded on Google. Most digital schools try to approach in similar ways and prices are not an excuse because they are so expensive. I completely understand how to move from "zero to one" in education (Peter Thiel) sounds like a crazy quest. However, it is the only way to make a difference in this industry which still shares similarities with our classes in universities where an unmotivated teacher presents a boring PPT. 

NDS is a small startup with big dreams. Please, dream on with dreams like next ones: Let's play more as children do with exercises during our classes (like Astra School by Elon Musk). Let's create more business cases as Gaston did with Skyscanner stories. Let's present more stories from product owners in their first years because everyone wants to feel authenticity and real-life experiences. Let's learn how to work and study asynchronously with everything: Questions during classes? No, please because we are so many students. Agile was created in a prepandemic word. Tell about new ways of doing Agile with remote teams because it is what we are going to face now. 

Dear NDS, maybe a first huge step is just to make a zoom meeting and talk with past NDS students. Only one question is enough. How can we make it better for next generations of NDS students? Old dogmas must be reviewed and connected with new contexts over and over. There is only one thing that does not change ever. 

Listening to customers closer and closer, over and over.

Daniel Wizard.

I’m super stoked to have been part of this Epic Master Programme! This has been the most astonishing Academic Course which I have been a part of.
During the course, you will enhance your soft and hard skills to transform into a Team Player and improve your natural Leadership skills, something that is highly appreciated in the Professional Market.
You will meet the most talented Teachers who will use all their Expertise and make you feel their passion and commitment from the 1st day.

You will get an Eagle Eyes Leadership by understanding all the stages needed to correctly analyze and run any type of business.  You'll master UX Research techniques, how to conduct real case studies, and build confidence in running your Elevator Pitch. Furthermore, you will learn how to write User stories, build OKR´S and North Star Metrics aligned with the Company´s Vision and goals.
This Master´s Programme will definitely help you work towards your goals, as well as being a better professional or developing your own business project

First:
I finished the course on best marks, attended most classes and activities, and do I am not holding any negative sentiment against anybody working for Business School. But considering the price of the course and the massive marketing, the school is operating, I feel it is only fair for everybody to publish a real review. I communicated my disappointment to the school, but the answer I got was rather like "we know about the points, we are sorry". 
Why you do not find negative reviews? Because people do not want to diminish their prospect for networking and the internet is a positive shining place, where personal branding is more important than being honest and accepting setbacks, such as taking part in one of the worst courses in the industry. But when I spoke personally to my fellow students, everybody had the same perception of the low course´s quality. 
As well, it seems that there are a lot of reviews done by the marketing team itself. 

The course overall is a failure. To keep it short, I will shoot out just some bullet points. Feel free to contact me for more details.

Point 1-4 is criticing the methodology of the course itself. It might be a very personal point of view, and maybe others are happy with how the course is organised.
The points following number 3 are essential "no-goes" for me, which made the course a negative experience over all. 

1. The streaming methodology:
95% percent of the course content is presented in streaming videos. The teachers are holding monologues about specific content. These videos can be interesting, but are mostly very monotonous and are difficult to follow without losing concentration. Later while working on your project, it is difficult to find specific content you are looking for. There is basically no material provided, they just  the slides they use in the videos. When I wanted to look something up, I rather went to Google or Youtube, where the content is presented in a much more creative way. And: the videos were done for previous editions of the course. So they just do the videos once (you can tell on their comments on the corona crisis, which were outdated when I have seen the video. Just a remark I remember)
My conclusion is: You have video courses on each topic on Youtube, which are much better done. 


2. The live sessions
Once a week, you have one-hour live sessions with different teachers, depending on the topic. The quality of these sessions is highly dependent on the teacher. Some are interesting and very informative, some are prepared very badly. Mostly it is as well just a teacher´s monologue. In general, they are too short, it feels more than you are attending a presentation than a class. As well, mostly the teachers are very strict on not having the class longer than the scheduled hour. You have the constant feeling, this course is just a side gig for them. You could tell by the number of students who attended the live sessions, which dropped each week, that the quality of these sessions is low and people were not motivated to spend time here. 

3. The final project and presentation
The final presentation was a huge disappointment for me. They give you 15 minutes, after that, they cut you off. Okay, everybody should learn how to present briefly, but what happened here is, there was 0 discussion with the fellow students about the projects, just a single question by the teacher and that's it. Done. Only one teacher of the school assisted, nobody else. Everything is short of time, rushing through. That's it, ciao.

4. What is missing in the course
You just see the streaming videos, take part in the live sessions and work on the final project. There are no (volunteering) Homeworks or business cases to recap the course´s material. There is no motivation from the school to keep people working actively on the material during the course. Also, there is no group building or networking between the students or other companies during the course. 
Working on the final project, you are mostly totally on your own. As long as you do not reach out to the teachers, they do not care. (This is their course methodology, you need to like it I guess). 
Along with my project team members and other students, I had contact to during the course, the motivation was very low, due to the low quality of the course. 

5. The student's week.
It was planned to have a student's week as the core event of the course, where we get intensive assistance working on the final project. It just has not taken place at all. The excuse for that was covid restrictions, which felt very strange. Covid taught us how to work remotely and a student's week could have been organized remotely perfectly. There was no replacement for the missing service, just some random live sessions, which were very boring, again you could tell that because almost nobody of the course was attending. Taking into account and sum up the services the school is providing through the course, that you have 16 live sessions (16 hours) and the students week would have had probably 25 hours of intensive work with the school, they just cut out more than the half of presential service of the course. Without any compensation. Later on, they offered me to work on the student's week the following course editions, but what sense did that make to wait a year for that?

6. SCRUM Certificate
Though it was offered in the course description, it did not take place

7. Job Board
The job board is just a LinkedIn Group, where they copy and paste job offers from public LinkedIn. They even mentioned "Entry job level" to Jobs where it was written that years of experience is required. When commented on that, I did not get any response. A total failure.

8. The final mark.
You present your project, and that is practically it. You get your final mark, which is a high score for everybody because they want everybody to be happy. There are no real critics of your deliveries. No final discussion about what you could have done better or in a different way. And the high point:
you need to build a Prototype of your product, which I did on a platform that provides me web analytics about the traffic on the website. And surprise, nobody of the school ever visited my prototype, though I got the best marks for that.
Same for my product backlog, which I have done on Jira, nobody ever checked it (The tool is giving you insights of which team member is entering, and the teacher was invited to do so, but he did not). I guess nobody ever has had a close look at our project deliveries. 

9. The price.
The price of the course is just not acceptable for what you get offered. Video Streaming Courses can be found on Youtube or on Udemy (for literally 0.1% of the course`s price). For the final project, you are mostly on your own.
The only case this price/course makes sense I guess is when you are working already on a real project. The teachers are professionals in their business with tons of experience. So, with a real-world problem, it makes sense to pay for a course to pay for their consulting and insights. For somebody who is looking for a career change, it is way overpriced. 
Btw, I got a "scholarship" (which is just a discount), because the marketing lady said my profile was very interesting to diverse the student's group. So, everybody, I spoke about it, got that discount. 

10. Job Guarantee
There is no effort by the school, to give you networking opportunities or job offers, which are not public yet. 
The only positive thing is, you upgrade your LinkedIn Profile with a new certificate, and this might maybe help. 

11. Job Seeking Track. 
This is rather anectode, but it had affect on my experience:
The course is offering two different side track, which you can choose. One is assisting on a real project you are working on, or, which I was interested in, a job seeking track. The motivation is to give you support in branding your self while looking for jobs.
For apply for that track, we had to write an E-Mail to the person in charge of the track. And, because sometimes my mind is somewhere else and I was on vacations, I missed the Deadline for a Day. This exclueded me from the job seeking track, they told me they were overwhelmed by the people who were interested for the track and do not have capacities to accept more students here. What made me wonder: Applying for the course, we clearly had to write about our motivation. And I guess, everybody who would apply for the job seeking track, had mentioned that motivation in her application. Still, they were not able to provied the capacity here. 
Anyway, I was invited to take part in the following edition of the Job Seeking Track. But, lets say, its quality fits to the previous experience I have with the school. 

Conclusion:
The course was giving me a hard time. Not because it was challenging, but because I spend 5 months thinking "what am I doing here and why did I spend so much money on it".

As a Career changer (i used to be a Chef for 10+ years), I found Nuclio and i couldnt be more happy because they gave me the tools that i need to start working as a developer ASAP, the program planning was exactly as they promised teaching me the trendiest tools in this world. (Talking about the ones companies are looking for juniors to know), the staff in the school is the other part of this amazing school. They were always very supportive in any need we had, a charging extension, an adaptor, a pen, a whiteboard. Even booking us a classroom so we could go any day to code without any extra fee or anything.

The best part was that the teachers are also working as developers on a daily basis, so they are also keeping themselves updated with trends, tools, and related stuff...

They also gave me the opportunity to participate in a series of seminars to improve my CV and linkedIn, how to handle a technical inteview, to get an insight of the job market and it really helped me to start!