Forum Discussion
What is Microsoft's relationship to coursera?
Julian_Sharp If I understand you correctly, I do not need Coursera, in that Coursera is using\accessing the Microsoft Learn az-204 courses (that are free) and is charging me for them. The Microsoft Learn courses will give me a free sandbox, thus doing away with what I thought that I needed Coursera for?
As far as the problems that I am having, and that you verified, and that I complained to Microsoft about, it appears that they are not going to do anything about. This does make me concerned about other possible problems that I am going to run into.
I have been looking at other sources of az-204 training.
I had looked at Udemy (courses are discounted about every other week), but the reason that they are discounted is that the videos are only sometimes in synch with Azure screens (total waste of time). They have nothing that is current.
I had tried a MS Endpoint\SCCM course at Pluralsight, but it was only after joining that you can see the requirements, that tell you that you need a very large system (lots of memory and disk space), in order to take the course.
Intellipaat - hints that you can get a discount, but unless you give an email and phone number, will not give you any course information.
A Cloud Academy - I started the 7-day free subscription, but when it came to the first lab, I could not access it (to be able to determine if it was current). Their response to this was
"some of our labs are not available due to security concerns." Seriously?
A Cloud Guru - doesn't answer up front question like, how current is the course.
If you are logged into the portal, and you hover on something like "App Services", and then select "free Training from Microsoft", you see the following..."This module requires a sandbox to complete. A sandbox gives you access to free resources. Your personal subscription will not be charged. The sandbox may only be used to complete training on Microsoft Learn. Use for any other reason is prohibited, and may result in permanent loss of access to the sandbox."
- Microsoft Learn sandboxes are free and include an Azure subscription named Concierge, you do not to sign up for or use an Azure trial to use the sandboxes
I had done a search on https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-204?tab=tab-learning-paths, of 'az-204', which is how I landed at the above link (two ways to prepare, and I chose online free).
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/introduction-to-azure-app-service/7-create-html-web-app. Perquisites says that you should have an active Azure subscription, and at the end it says to delete the resources that were created for this exercise. Obviously not a sandbox.
If I take a different path, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/publish-azure-web-app-with-visual-studio/5-exercise-publish-an-asp.net-app-from-visual-studio
Then, there is a sandbox. So, is this saying that if you go down the certification path, there is no sandbox, and if you don't choose the certification path, you then get the free sandbox?
- Sandboxes in MS Learn include Azure subscriptions (except for some of the AI-900 ones) so they are free.
Your original post you were referring to a learn module with a sandbox and whether you needed to pay for the sandbox.
Some of the MS Learn modules do not include sandboxes so for those you will need a free 30-day Azure trial subscription or a paid subscription. However, you will be spending less than a few dollars to complete all the labs in a course if you follow the instructions and delete the resources when you finish each lab.
There is no relationship between modules with sandboxes and exams. Microsoft are updating modules to include sandboxes but I expect it to take some time for all modules to be so changed.
