The Student Room Group

University of Leeds Online Msc in artificial Intellegence

Leeds just offers a new online Msc program in AI, I am wondering if anyone is currently on this program. would like to ask your thoughts about the course.
did you manage to find anything? I'm looking to apply to start in September.
I am very interested in this program too. Any update?
I am currently taking the Master's course in AI at Leeds University. I would very strongly discourage people from following this course. There are very few video lectures and some of those that are available are of very poor quality. You are given only ONE hour of webinar or directly taught courses per week and most of these are badly planned Q&A sessions.
The students have tried complaining to the DES (digital education service). But without any reply or improvement.
I feel cheated. Having already invested so much in this course with Leeds University I am now somewhat obliged to finish paying the 18 000 €.
I DO NOT recommend taking online courses with Leeds university
(edited 1 year ago)
Very sad to know that. It looks like that most of UK online programs only provide very short video lectures which is very different from those program in Coursera and Edx platform.

Original post by ALeedsStudent
I am currently taking the Master's course in AI at Leeds University. I would very strongly discourage people from following this course. There are very few video lectures and some of those that are available are of very poor quality. You are given only ONE hour of webinar or directly taught courses per week and most of these are badly planned Q&A sessions.
The students have tried complaining to the DES (digital education service). But without any reply or improvement.
I feel cheated. Having already invested so much in this course with Leeds University I am now somewhat obliged to finish paying the 18 000 €.
I DO NOT recommend taking online courses with Leeds university
Reply 5
I'm currently in the last course before the final project. My advice is to avoid this program at all costs!!!! Almost everything that Leeds said is fraud.



1. No flexibility at all !!!! Although on their website, they divide their courses into compulsory modules and optional courses, this doesn't means you can choose the classes you want to take from the optional courses. All of them are compulsory !! Also, the sequence you study in those courses is fixed. If you want to skip one course for whatever reason. You have to delay your graduation date for 1 year. I knew that I would be swamped from March to July, but I had to take the two hardest courses if I dont want to waste one more year.


2. Poorly structured courses. You must complete each course within 7 weeks (6 weeks' content plus 1-week final test). You only got one week break between each module. For some accessible courses, this makes sense; yet, you some difficult ones, this structure is insane. Bear in mind this is a part-time degree most students have 20 hours of study time per week. For some modules, they want to master deep learning, reinforce learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning from scratch within 120 hours.



3. The difficulty of the course is insane. I believe handling this program is easy for someone with some background in programming, but the University of Leeds advertised their program as welcoming someone without a programming background, like me. Before studying this course, I have some basic calculus experience and zero coding experience. The difficulty for me is insane. I am a fast learner because I got distinctions in all the courses I passed, but courses like deep learning, robotics and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning are ridiculous for me. I failed the deep learning and Robotic course, although I got over 75% on one of the assignments (2 in total), which tested the basic concept.



4. The quality of the module is rubbish. More than 80% of the content is purely presented as plain text. That webpage just copy-pasted from the textbook, plus some minor revisions. You can easily find all of that knowledge online. Only around 1/3 of modules have a lot of videos to explain the content. However, you can also find some better and more detailed videos on Youtube for free!! Just give you an example of the low quality of the content. The second part of the robotic module is about reinforce-learning. All you have is 12 Jupiter notebook files with some explanation. Besides this, all you have is 3 hours online seminar held by the instructor. You have to study and master the reinforce-learning within 3 weeks and train a robotic under the Virtual Machine. The instructors or TA will host an online seminar once a week; however, in most cases, that video seminar is poorly organized. In most cases, I have to rely on Youtube videos to solve my problem (Thanks to the StatQuest channel and those Indian instructors, you are my saver). The University of Leeds charged me over 1500 pounds per module. It provided very little help, and those Youtuber helped me a lot for free!



5. Extremely irresponsible or unhelpful staff. I didn't mean all of them but many of them. You can easily find that some instructors simply reuse the content from the previous year without any fixing. I feel alright to do so if there is no new content you need to add; however, please fix any mistakes and errors in the contents and homework!! I can understand that you are not a good lecturer and you can't explain your knowledge verbally, but fixing some obvious mistakes has nothing to do with ability but is related to responsibility. I can boldly guess that those instructors never really look at the student feedback. Besides the instructors, the other staffs are very irresponsible as well. They dispatch the wrong VM passcode at the beginning of the Robotic Reasoning and Logic modules. Some students said they had the exact same failure as last year. During the robotic modules, the staff did not release the second half of the contents more than 3 weeks late. I have to study reinforcement learning from zero to be able to train a virtual robotic model within 3 weeks. Fabulously. The grader is a joke as well. I got a high fever (very likely to be Covid-19) during the I wrote the first deep learning assessment. Although I feel bad, I thought I could still manage this assignment; however, I got some problems transferring the necessary data into the format I needed. I try more than 30 hours to fix this bug by suffering a high fever. In the end, I can't fix it. I decided to complete the following code and make the grader know my logic about this project and wish I could have some points from it. However, the grader simply runs the program and only grades the code before the bug. I acknowledge that the grader has the right to do this, but I feel insulted because I feel I paid a lot of effort and they treated me like a joker. Then I filed an application for mitigating circumstances. I explained that I got a high fever while I was writing this assignment. I simply asked the university to review my code after bugs and wish they could give me some points for my logic and knowledge understanding. However, 3 days later, I received a solid not due to a lack of evidence proving I got a high fever. Okay, fair enough. But in March this year, one week before the Robotic module's first test, my grandpa got a critical illness, and I had to travel aboard to take care of my grandpa. I am not sure I will be able to come back to study before the exam deadline. So I am applying for the mitigating circumstance once again and wish they can extend my deadline for an exam. I attached all the evidence I have in the application; however, this time, I didn't hear anything back until now. It is 82 days since I filed the application, and they are supposed to say yes or no within 3 days. I have to do the exam in my grandpa's warden and check my grandpa's status sometime during the exam. I will never forgive them.

6. Little support. Although the University of Leeds brags about its resources and Minvera system, do trust them. Indeed, Leeds has strong CS and AI research resources, but those have nothing to do with your study. Those resources, in general, have very little help for your study. Instead, you can only post your questions on the discussion board and wish someone would answer them. Unfortunately, most students are very quiet on the discussion board, and only a few of them wish to answer your questions. Some instructors are helpful, but some of them are not. The Minerva system, in my opinion, is simply the Blackboard platform with a cover of the University of Leeds, nothing special. Smartphone accessibility to online content is okay; however, you can't open the exercise on your cellphone. The University of Leeds is really good at bragging about its product. For example, on one module syllabus, they said there would be formative MCQs with automated feedback to help you understand the content. They didn't lay; there are some grade scope tests after each section with around 10 MCQs. Once you submit, they will automatically tell you which questions you are wrong. This is so-called automated feedback. No explanation for the question at all. I believe I can train my parrot to do the same thing within a month!

I have been studying in 4 different colleges in UK and US. The quality of this program is way below the standard. If you have enough background and money, come to this program and get a degree from a "prestige" university. Otherwise, stay away from this program. You can find a much better study program somewhere else with 1/20 of the price. In the end.
Reply 6
I am about 50% of the way done and I agree with everything Kehar above said but I would like to add more

The biggest and more alarming problem to me is that I am on the second cohort I believe, and all/most the problems that the first cohort have mentioned are still there

For robotics in my cohort we were given material late which was extremely inconvenient. There have been at least 3 instances where we were told to expect marks on day X but were not given it. I am not against giving them more time but if you say you will deliver a task on Monday, you should deliver it on Monday. That may seem like a nitpick but there are enough small mistakes that you can not attribute it to being a new course. Marking also takes longer than it should, for me personally the grade I get is important to my future plans when I finish a unit I would like to know my full grade so I know how hard to work on the next unit but there have been several occasions where I haven't got my last unit's result back and have to move forward. (In my opinion a lot of the material is not worth looking at so I need to balance interacting enough with Leeds to get a good grade but finding a way to self learn by myself of more useful material)

Another thing is that the feedback for many assessments is extremely poor, for example report writing for me has been very little feedback and thus no chance to improve its been 2-3 months and 5-6 email and I still haven't had any response for 1 of my units.

Some of the units I believe are extremely poor such as data mining and text analytics , I would say it is almost a net negative to your learning, as there are so many better things to be looking at the the material and coursework is extremely irrelevant, ( you may think i am exaggerating) I am not, you would have learnt several fold more watching a video on YouTube about Large language models and going over it yourself.

I dont think the programming unit is better or anywhere near close to what is free online but it is a part of the degree so it is something you have to accept.

Some units I would say the material and content is fair like Data Science, but overall most units seem to have very little coherence , the carousel ( meaning there are 4 points where you can join) look to be more like a cash grab trading on their name rather than providing a high quality well though out course.

Overall take
If for some reason you need to get a degree from a university and financially it can make sense and want to do it online I dont think there are many other places right now, but honestly if thats not the case, then stay away from this course it is generally terrible.
Original post by Kehar
I'm currently in the last course before the final project. My advice is to avoid this program at all costs!!!! Almost everything that Leeds said is fraud.



1. No flexibility at all !!!! Although on their website, they divide their courses into compulsory modules and optional courses, this doesn't means you can choose the classes you want to take from the optional courses. All of them are compulsory !! Also, the sequence you study in those courses is fixed. If you want to skip one course for whatever reason. You have to delay your graduation date for 1 year. I knew that I would be swamped from March to July, but I had to take the two hardest courses if I dont want to waste one more year.


2. Poorly structured courses. You must complete each course within 7 weeks (6 weeks' content plus 1-week final test). You only got one week break between each module. For some accessible courses, this makes sense; yet, you some difficult ones, this structure is insane. Bear in mind this is a part-time degree most students have 20 hours of study time per week. For some modules, they want to master deep learning, reinforce learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning from scratch within 120 hours.



3. The difficulty of the course is insane. I believe handling this program is easy for someone with some background in programming, but the University of Leeds advertised their program as welcoming someone without a programming background, like me. Before studying this course, I have some basic calculus experience and zero coding experience. The difficulty for me is insane. I am a fast learner because I got distinctions in all the courses I passed, but courses like deep learning, robotics and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning are ridiculous for me. I failed the deep learning and Robotic course, although I got over 75% on one of the assignments (2 in total), which tested the basic concept.



4. The quality of the module is rubbish. More than 80% of the content is purely presented as plain text. That webpage just copy-pasted from the textbook, plus some minor revisions. You can easily find all of that knowledge online. Only around 1/3 of modules have a lot of videos to explain the content. However, you can also find some better and more detailed videos on Youtube for free!! Just give you an example of the low quality of the content. The second part of the robotic module is about reinforce-learning. All you have is 12 Jupiter notebook files with some explanation. Besides this, all you have is 3 hours online seminar held by the instructor. You have to study and master the reinforce-learning within 3 weeks and train a robotic under the Virtual Machine. The instructors or TA will host an online seminar once a week; however, in most cases, that video seminar is poorly organized. In most cases, I have to rely on Youtube videos to solve my problem (Thanks to the StatQuest channel and those Indian instructors, you are my saver). The University of Leeds charged me over 1500 pounds per module. It provided very little help, and those Youtuber helped me a lot for free!



5. Extremely irresponsible or unhelpful staff. I didn't mean all of them but many of them. You can easily find that some instructors simply reuse the content from the previous year without any fixing. I feel alright to do so if there is no new content you need to add; however, please fix any mistakes and errors in the contents and homework!! I can understand that you are not a good lecturer and you can't explain your knowledge verbally, but fixing some obvious mistakes has nothing to do with ability but is related to responsibility. I can boldly guess that those instructors never really look at the student feedback. Besides the instructors, the other staffs are very irresponsible as well. They dispatch the wrong VM passcode at the beginning of the Robotic Reasoning and Logic modules. Some students said they had the exact same failure as last year. During the robotic modules, the staff did not release the second half of the contents more than 3 weeks late. I have to study reinforcement learning from zero to be able to train a virtual robotic model within 3 weeks. Fabulously. The grader is a joke as well. I got a high fever (very likely to be Covid-19) during the I wrote the first deep learning assessment. Although I feel bad, I thought I could still manage this assignment; however, I got some problems transferring the necessary data into the format I needed. I try more than 30 hours to fix this bug by suffering a high fever. In the end, I can't fix it. I decided to complete the following code and make the grader know my logic about this project and wish I could have some points from it. However, the grader simply runs the program and only grades the code before the bug. I acknowledge that the grader has the right to do this, but I feel insulted because I feel I paid a lot of effort and they treated me like a joker. Then I filed an application for mitigating circumstances. I explained that I got a high fever while I was writing this assignment. I simply asked the university to review my code after bugs and wish they could give me some points for my logic and knowledge understanding. However, 3 days later, I received a solid not due to a lack of evidence proving I got a high fever. Okay, fair enough. But in March this year, one week before the Robotic module's first test, my grandpa got a critical illness, and I had to travel aboard to take care of my grandpa. I am not sure I will be able to come back to study before the exam deadline. So I am applying for the mitigating circumstance once again and wish they can extend my deadline for an exam. I attached all the evidence I have in the application; however, this time, I didn't hear anything back until now. It is 82 days since I filed the application, and they are supposed to say yes or no within 3 days. I have to do the exam in my grandpa's warden and check my grandpa's status sometime during the exam. I will never forgive them.

6. Little support. Although the University of Leeds brags about its resources and Minvera system, do trust them. Indeed, Leeds has strong CS and AI research resources, but those have nothing to do with your study. Those resources, in general, have very little help for your study. Instead, you can only post your questions on the discussion board and wish someone would answer them. Unfortunately, most students are very quiet on the discussion board, and only a few of them wish to answer your questions. Some instructors are helpful, but some of them are not. The Minerva system, in my opinion, is simply the Blackboard platform with a cover of the University of Leeds, nothing special. Smartphone accessibility to online content is okay; however, you can't open the exercise on your cellphone. The University of Leeds is really good at bragging about its product. For example, on one module syllabus, they said there would be formative MCQs with automated feedback to help you understand the content. They didn't lay; there are some grade scope tests after each section with around 10 MCQs. Once you submit, they will automatically tell you which questions you are wrong. This is so-called automated feedback. No explanation for the question at all. I believe I can train my parrot to do the same thing within a month!

I have been studying in 4 different colleges in UK and US. The quality of this program is way below the standard. If you have enough background and money, come to this program and get a degree from a "prestige" university. Otherwise, stay away from this program. You can find a much better study program somewhere else with 1/20 of the price. In the end.

Hello thanks so much for your breakdown of the course at Leeds University I'm looking at the syllabus now. And sorry to hear about the difficulties you had with the course sounds like they have some work to do.

I've already signed up to the course and a bit before about it all, would you be able to head some light on the algorithms course? Did you find it difficult? How was it assessed? What grade did you get?

Thanks in advance
Reply 8
leeds university just open a new online master of statistics(data science) program on Coursera.I assume the new program will have better quality for sure.
Original post by Anonymous
Leeds just offers a new online Msc program in AI, I am wondering if anyone is currently on this program. would like to ask your thoughts about the course.

It is not worth it.
Original post by independent46
It is not worth it.

Can you provide more detail? They provided two courses to try, the quality was terrible, they just put some txt file at coursera, ask to read instead of recorded videos.
Original post by tezozheng2
Can you provide more detail? They provided two courses to try, the quality was terrible, they just put some txt file at coursera, ask to read instead of recorded videos.

The time investment into online students is very small. The comments above are 100% true. For rare exceptions, the quality of materials given to online students is poor, grading is arbitrary and there is no transparency in the feedback if you are lucky to get any.

Quick Reply

Latest

Trending

Trending