RMOTR

***RMOTR has merged with another online education company as of Sep 2019, so the course curriculum may have changed.***

I completed the Python Data Science course summer 2019. Personally I think a lot of self discipline and commitment to apply what you learn on some passion projects are required in order to make this worth while, but the same can be applied to any other online remote bootcamps. That's why it is 1/10 of the cost of an onsite fulltime bootcamp. The first two months were python fundamentals (those were great intro with awesome teachers) and the last month was data science libraries. Towards the last month, the subjects get more challenging with less time to go through in details during the weekly 2 hour (twice) online live sessions. The mentoring session availability was very limited to specific time and day during the week. 

The downside here is that they decided to make the "final project" as optional and promised that we could schedule and/or request for feedback on the final project if students decided to pursue it, but that was not the case. In the end,  they issued certificates without reviewing the project. I assume it is most likely because RMOTR was busy merging with another online education company. I am happy for their success, but I would appreciate more if they actually finish their commitment with students to review final projects as part of the course. It felt very unstructured at the end. 

Did I learn how to write basic Python functions? Yes

Did I learn how to explore and apply basic data science libraries? Yes (a lot of self discipline to learn and google on your own is required here)

Is this a hands-on course? Yes (in the beginning for Python fundamentals, they have test driven examples for you to practice with) and No (towards the end especially when creating your final projects, I felt I was left in the dark)

I am not sure what will happen after the merger as they are changing their learning platform, but I hope they will learn to be more transparent and accountable with their students to follow through the completion of the course. If this becomes purely an online course with self-paced materials, I believe there are other resources at a much cheaper price (ie. Udemy Jose Portilla data science and machine learning course for $13), but otherwise (if it still has live sessions), it is worth exploring. 

I'm very happy I chose RMOTR as a first online introduction to Data Science. 

The main reason is how the course is structured. Most online courses will have you start working on data science libraries right away. This is a mistake in my opinion. 

It is important to understand and know the basics of Python before using these libraries. Otherwise, you're going to miss the fundamentals which will hinder your development if you want to take things further. 

RMOTR starts with 2 months of Python before teaching you data science libraries which I thought was very helpful. 

Something else that is very important: teachers are great and knowledgable. They are always available to answer questions of all types, whether about an exercice you are stuck on, or even career development. 

Joining RMOTR means you are part of a community which helps staying on top of news, interesting articles & projects. You can also post your problem to the community and get help from other students. 

Obvisouly not everything is perfect. Here is what I think they could do better:

 - Sometimes the exercices they give are pretty difficult compared to the material we learned in class. I would have loved it if there were hints in some of the exercices to help solve the problem. 

 - During Christmas holidays, it wasn't 100% clear what the schedule was. The agenda switched a bit during that period, and communication could have been better. 

Overall, I recommend this program if you are looking to get into data science, and especially if you prefer taking an option where you have an actual class and community with a teacher going over the material. This is what I was looking for in contrast with the self paced options. I wanted to have classes every week to stay motivated.

I could not have asked for a more engaging experience!

Not even at my University level did I meet any instructors who were as engaging and commited as those who guided me through the program at RMOTR. Amazing value for price.

Instructors/Curriculum

From the instructors, at every level, I found the most understanding patience of the learning process. This level of understanding is also reflected through RMOTR's UX, the website navigates through the curriculm, which I found to give a great in-depth lesson into Python, Django and Data Science(using Python). 

Commitment

This program does run quite a commitment, though there is a bit more freedom than in-person bootcamps. What I loved most about the program was that the classes were recorded and posted to review within hours, this was phenomenal with revisiting and graping a better hold to lessons.

Final Project

The final project is a fun and intense dash of work. Working collaboratively(if you so chose to work in a group) is a great lesson in taking refining project scopes, identifying goals, working toward these goals, adjusting, and presenting. 

Conclusion

I would highly reccomend RMOTR to any individual who is interested in learning Python and interested in either Django and/or Data Science. It was absoluetely a blast learning and feeling the trenches of a lesson and emerging with a better understanding. Much like a good workout, it's going to work you to a better inidividual. 

<3

I attended the Intro to Python rmotr's course in November, and had a great experience. I loved the way how lectures were organised, with a clear path to go from point A to B, know what to do and when to do it.
I guess that's one of the hardest part of learning. Knowing how to avoid wasting time reading or looking for resources that are not good enough.
Mentors were also really helpful and kind.
I had a few issues with the class time, and I couldn't attend to a few of them. I hope they could support more timezones for people out of US.

I attended to rmotr's online free python course in September and had a very good experience. Very charismatic instructors that were able to break down concepts very simply. The students platform was quite good, easy to use and intuitive. We were using Zoom for videoconferences, and it required some previous software installations. Maybe google HO would have been easier to  use.
Not much to critic aside from that. Being a free training, it's a great deal.

I loved the fact that I could do this at home, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to graduate from any other school because I work everyday and arrive home late at night.

I don't have much to say about RMOTR, it's just a good place to learn Python, period.
There was a stumble the first day with software related issues, but everything else was great. 

Sadly they don't offer much variety in terms of technology. All courses are about Python and related stuff. I will keep an eye to their website, hopping they are more courses soon.

That's was my first experience learning remotely with real instructors! I liked, I recommend all people that want learn python to subscribe in rmotr.com.

There are lots of projects to practice and improve our knowledge and you can spend time with mentors who will help you with any questions you have.

I only struggled a bit with the class time! For my timezone its recommend to start in 7 PM EU or in weekend.

Mentor hours and group projects were a big plus in RMOTR's program. It would be great if they introduce some TDD practices in between, but it's just a suggestion.

There's also a ton of exercises to practice if you have enough time. You won't get bored for sure! It was sometimes hard to catch up if I missed a class, because the pace was quite intensive.

I'm still waiting for the official certificate, that we are supposed to get after graduation.

I tried many different ways of learning Python online (Udemy, Codecademy, and many other). Many of them are really cool, and I also learnt some topics. But, what I liked the most about RMOTR's program is the teachers and mentors interaction. That's what makes these programs differentiate from other self-paced solo-learning ones. I loved that.
Most of the written comunication was exclusively on slack. I didn't like that. I'd like annoucements to come in email too. 

I found particularly interesting how all lessons and classes were detailed thought and talked about specific topics or practices that is not easy to find in books or surfing Internet. That's what I expected to get from an instructor-lead course like this. Everything else can be found online.

My local timezone didn't match very well with class times, but that's actually my personal issue. Sometimes it was hard for me to attend classes on time, or stay awake during the whole class time.

I signed up for the web development track and they immediately failed to meet even the most basic assumptions.  Their platform appears to be about average but it was so buggy that I was submitting tickets several times a day trying to get them to fix it.  From there it's worse because they don't respond in a timely fashion.  Additionally, their "unlimited mentor support" really means a couple nights a week and if you're lucky you might get help on a weekend.  

I'm a very experienced developer in other languages and have a little experience in python.  

I give them a flat F for failing to think this through.  It very much feels like something they're running out of their basement to make some side cash.     

Well I actually didn't get the chance to try their courses because they failed to attend our very first session!
I was scheduled for an interview regarding their Data Science course, and they even sent me 2 reminders on the day of the interview, then guess what, RMOTR interviewer didn't show up?!
I spent the next 30 mins hoping someone will show up, I even checked the time and date again just to make sure I didn't miss anything.
I also used their live chatting service, no response there as well!
A horoble experience without ever attending a single session!

After taking the introduction to python course, I'm not sure that the other reviewers took the same course I did. Because of the scheduled course times and promises of adding projects to our github profiles, I assumed this was a well-structured course with clear goals and expectations, but this course felt disorganized and disjointed. The syllabus is a bulleted list with no description of lessons or assignments, no dates. The lectures left me feeling unprepared for the assignments, and the lectures were very short compared to what I expected (often ending quite early). I expected 4 hours of lecture material prepared each week, but at least two of those hours were for working on assigments (as individuals or groups). Working in groups was extremely inconvenient, and I would have preferred about triple the amount of individual assignments during the first 3-4 weeks of the course, and then work on larger projects as a group (or individual, if preferred) during the last couple weeks once we all got used to working with github and the IDE, and comfortable with the overall flow of the course.

There was a distinct lack of awareness or interest in accessibility: transcripts are not provided for the lectures (I asked), and there is a heavy reliance on Google hangouts for voice and video communication. The teacher hopped around a lot when sharing his screen, flipflopping between tabs and windows, which made it very difficult to follow. He was very receptive when I brought it up to him, but the fact that I even had to bring it up (and the fact that providing transcripts is not something they will do) told me a lot. A RMOTR employee in the slack chat also used disabled slurs and did not respond when I messaged them privately.

The slides are provided for the lectures, but they are not super helpful, and they are white text on a blue background, and therefore not easily printable or useful for note-taking.

The course was advertised as a good introduction for anyone who wants to learn Python, and listed Codecademy's Python course as a good starting point and prerequesite. Other than Codecademy, I have very little coding experience, and felt completely unprepared for this course. The instructor and mentors kept saying "it'll all make sense soon" and I kept holding out hoping the next lesson would be "the one" where they tied it all together, but it never happened, and eventually 6 weeks passed.

In hindsight, I wish I'd requested a refund.

Out of desperate frustration around week 4, I searched for ways to supplement this course and to do what I set out to do (learn Python), and i discovered coursera's Intro to Python specialization program. This turned out to be much more appropriate for a beginner, and it actually covered much more material in a much shorter time-- if you've got no programming experience and want a more structured educational experience, you might try that instead of RMOTR.

RMOTR's intro to python course is probably great for people who have much more coding experience than I have, and are just looking to learn a little bit of Python to supplement their current skillsets. It is not for true beginners who are looking to learn Python as a first language.

The online environment needs some work: There's a students section and a learn section for individual assignments and for accessing lectures, and it's not clear which is which without loading them. The RMOTR environment for individual assignments is terrible if you need to higher magnification. Zoom is used for lectures, Hangouts and Cloud9 are expected for group work, Github instruction left a lot to be desired, Slack is used for general course information and off-topic memes or offensive conversations... At one point a google calendar went out, too, but I don't think it was ever updated. I highly suggest that RMOTR change their format so that it's more of an all-in-one experience, or lay out all the links, supplementing materials, expectations, and hardware/software requirements in one central location.

Mentors are available on a fairly regular basis to answer questions, which was helpful, but I wish that the material had been presented in a way that I didn't need so much handholding. With Coursera, all I needed to do was review the course materials a little more before figuring out the problems myself. The material really isn't available through RMOTR-- you really have to ask for help if you get stuck and don't have previous Python experience. The assignments for RMOTR are more about making tests pass, rather than about learning to write code.

I took this course because I heard about it through their new partnership with Women Who Code, and I feel like RMOTR has a lot more growing to do before I'd recommend this course or this company to anyone.

I've got many more comments and suggestions but RMOTR should hire me as a consultant if they want my expertise. :)

I found really interesting how well designed each project was during the course. It was not just a bunch of assignments. They were specially thought to practice each of the concepts learnt during the classes.

I also really liked the way instructors explained topics using slides and sharing screen in their computers. In my old experience with other schools, instructors were teaching concepts by typing sample snippeds that many times were boring or not really giving a good example of the topic we were covering.

Aside from everything else, the human factor involved in RMOTR is probably the greatest aggregated value this school has. I really loved the community and the group of classmates I had.

If you have enough time to commit, I recomment it.

I like the forced accountability that encouraged me to to a lot of work. I was also pushed out of my comfort zone. I was learning Python at a much slower pace before the class, and now I feel like I have a good foundation to more forward at an accelerated pace.

The schedule is a little too rigorous. But I think that may have a lot to do with me having next to no coding experience. I felt like a lot of the time most of the other students were much further ahead of me while I was catching up. Perhaps in the future, maybe encourage people more and let them know that being behind is okay and that they should not feel intimidated. But in the end, I got a lot out of it so it turned out ok :)

I was impressed of the cool platform RMOTR built to foster the collaborative work remotly. I liked the collaborative coding and individual approach of great mentors.

Curriculom in general is good. I liked that they mentioned many times related topics, that maybe were not explained in details, but at least let us know those topics exist and give us the chance to learn them by ourself later.

A good example of that is MongoDB, that is not included in the scope of this couse, but let me know at least a bit about it and allowed me to keep learning by myown.

The instructors were responsive and personable. They actually cared if we understood lessons no matter what level we came into the class as.

Honestly, I don't have any bad things to say about it. I know in this kind of reviews is useful for other students to also read about bad things, or things I didn't like as a student of RMOTR. But, I had such a good experience working with this guys, that I only have good words to say about it.

Mentors were always willing to help and pushing us to go for the next challenge. I would have never kept myself as accountable if it wasn't because of the pre defined schedule and the weekly sessions.

I had the chance to talk a lot with Jason, and he is a great mentor. I used to be frustrated very easily in the past, but having someone like Jason helping me on my side made me feel a lot more confident of what I can achieve.

One small suggestion. I would have liked for the slides to be printer-friendly.

I really liked the variety of coding projects, and they way how they were structured to tackle specific topics covered in the class.

There was only one real class a week. When taking a class, I mean to be taught by the teachers. During that class a lot of topics were explained, and sometimes it was hard to pay attention and keep the pace during the two hours of class. I would maybe split the class into a few days, and mix them with projects to practice the covered concepts.

I'm more than happy with the overall experience.

The projects helped a lot with retaining what was covered in the lessons. I think that having an instructor leading a class and explaining each topic is a wonderful way of learning.

There were lots of projects, maybe a bit too many. But I would have loved to have more time to tackle them all.

I was a bit frustrated with other online platforms that I used in the past to learn programming, but with RMOTR I now believe again that it's something totally doable.

Working in groups with other people remotly was great. I'm from India, and don't have much chances to learn in my local city. RMOTR gave me the chance to share a classroom with folk from the main cities in the US, and that's an incredible opportunity.

The only thing is that there is not enough time to complete the pre-readings if the individual taking the course is a full time employee somewhere, so it's very important to specify that this course if for people who can work on this full time. Other than that it's great.

Working in groups with other people from all around the world, from home, was simply amazing.

I didn't feel like there was enough time to complete most of the assignments, but that's probably associated to my bussy weekly schedule. It's know that it's an intensive course, so I should have reserved more time to commit in the extra readings/coding.

I think it's a great approach. If anything, I would say that having a little more time for readings, and having supplementary material for subjects that are not central to the course but are necessary for projects would help (e.g. I would have worked through a SQL tutorial before the last week had I known it would be needed.) Also as I mentioned on the call, I think materials on debugging, linting and all of that fun stuff would be a great help. Some of this I learned from other students, but that is hit or miss.

I want to enroll for the more advanced course as well. This methodology definitely made my learn a lot in a short time.

The greatest part is having live class and coding sessions.

I didn't feel like the coding exercises in the homework assignments on the learn site were very helpful. I'm not sure what would make them better.

I liked the process a lot. Knowing that we had an opportunity to ask questions in class about the reading topics, and knowing that we would be using the concepts we were reading and discussing for our coding sessions provided good motivation to prepare, and the class was structured so we could prepare well. The readings were very helpful, but they were hard to get done. I take a while to process what I read, and it would have been helpful if the readings had been available earlier. I think if they had been posted a full week before the class sessions, I would have been ready to ask more questions in class.

Recommended.

Doing group programming live on cloud9 was fantastic. I never thought attending an experience like this from the confort of my home, sharing the class with folks from all around the globe.

Sometimes the suggested reading was too much for me to do. But that's probably my personal issue.

I really liked working in teams with mentor help. It might have been good to have the whole group read the project assignment before hand so we could just jump right in to coding when the time starts.

It was a great experience overall, but maybe there could be a structure that works more easily with full-time workers. For example, readings and class during the week with an easy project. Then two intense projects during the weekend.

Group work was a bit hard for me sometimes. I am guilty of this as well - especially during the work week real life commitments took away how much I or my teammates could contribute.

Aside from that, I would totally recommend this methodology. Kept me accountable the whole month.

It was great that professors are super kind and helpful.

I feel like a lot of material was just thrown at us. i.e. I did not know how to use the time module and I needed it for the decorator problem. However, we never touched on how to implement those modules. It would be nice to see the professors code more, and see how they solve similar problems. Anyway, I understand that this is how real life works, and getting prepared for that it's also a good experience.

Interesting projects that exposed me to a variety of topics in python.

Sometimes the projects involved libraries that were confusing, and so instead of getting to spending most of the time learning about the topic that we were supposed to be learning, we had to waste a lot of time struggling to understand the other library (e.g. in the decorator project, dealing with logger. Or in the mix-in project, dealing with argparse.). I would suggest that when there is an extra library being used in a project, there should be some practice with it in the learn platform ahead of time, so we can get used to the syntax.

Also, I think having more experience building a project from scratch is important. Having the interface and tests already created is probably 90% of a typical project. And overall project structure (how to structure packages and modules) is something that I don't know much about and wish I had had the chance to practice in this course.

Another issue was when the tests had errors in them that made it impossible to pass the tests. That made the coding sessions frustrating, because we were not just debugging our own code but the tests also.

Finally, I thought there was a big difference in what was taught during the lessons on Wednesday and what we were expected to do in the coding sessions. I found that most of the Wednesday sessions didn't teach me much that I didn't already know from the assigned reading, learn platform, or previous experience. But then when we got to the actual coding session it was far more difficult than what was taught. I think it would be better to assume/require people have done the reading and then teach the class accordingly so that we learn more in the teaching sessions.

That said, I still think it's a great course and methodology. I would totally recommend it.

I loved the intensity and collaborating with other course takers.

I truly enjoyed my experience with the RMOTR guys, I have just two things I'd want to have shared with me if I were a RMOTR owner: 1. I felt a few times that mentors were pushy / overbearing in their 'help' during coding sessions. I had been cut off mid-thought several times while trying to describe my problem + thought processes. Once the mentor saw the issue, I felt flooded with 'xyz' on what to do; most often this left me more confused on what the code was doing and why. 2. I posted in the mentors-help Slack channel twice over the 4 week course, both times it felt slow to have someone get back to me; which I didn't really like in the moment - a good chunk of the Rmotr sales pitch was 'mentored learning', between this and point 1, I'd have to say I feel better mentored by my peers than Rmotr itself. A few checks-and-balances to what I'm saying here: I asked for mentors-help at weird times (e.g. Sunday evening) and I probably should have been in the beginner's camp (as the material was too dense for me to get through in the 4-week time frame). All in all, I'm very happy I chose RMOTR and would give you my business again under the right circumstances. Thanks so much

The people at RMOTR, whether they are the instructors, mentors, or fellow students, are perhaps the best part of the RMOTR experience. Everyone is very helpful, kind, and they all want you to understand the material.

"What follows is my perspective as a student who literally picked up coding earlier this year in January 2017. For others, I under these criticisms may not apply. At multiple points in the course, I found myself in way over my head in terms of the difficulty of the projects. This is both a good and bad thing. It's good because it is helpful to learn difficult concepts. But on the other hand, the feeling of helplessness during some of the projects left me very drained. Especially with further projects on the horizon with even more difficult and novel concepts. For example, after trying to learn one library or module in one project, we are thrown into a new project where we have to tackle even more modules, novel syntax from other frameworks, and even more new syntax from SQL databases. I am happy to try and learn all of these things. But all at once, in a 2-3 hour coding session, is quite daunting. I would have appreciated more practice and familiarity with some of these modules/libraries and concepts outside of the coding sessions. I'm not sure what could or could not be done with the 'learn' environment. In the latter half of the course, 'learn' is used a lot less and while I'm not sure the comparison to the Introductory Course is apt here, but in that course, the 'learn' assignments were much more helpful in preparation for the coding sessions and projects. Lastly, the more difficult projects seem like they would take most people quite some time to complete, necessitating more coding sessions. It can be difficult to arrange times outside the allotted schedule with other students and mentors to get help. P.S. - You guys should clone Jason Symons."