A 50% AI-degree sale, a deal that ends today, and a code that just changed

Your Thursday roundup — three deals I've checked on the actual checkout page this morning, two genuinely new courses, and the biggest piece of online-learning news in months. One of the deals expires today, so that one's first.

🔖 Deals worth grabbing this week

Today is the last day: DataCamp Premium is 50% off — $330 down to $165 for the year. I've flagged this one three times since it opened on July 13, and this is genuinely the end of it. That's 700+ interactive data and AI courses, the career tracks and the certifications, for the price of about two months at the normal rate. If you've been circling it, this is the morning to decide.

The biggest discount on the list: Udacity's Back to School sale takes 50% off through Sunday, August 10 — the monthly subscription drops from $249 to $124.50, and the four-month prepay works out at $106 a month. It covers subscriptions, bundles and one-off Nanodegrees. Full details, including the bit their email doesn't spell out, in the box below.

And a correction I owe you. In the last two roundups I gave you CFI's code COURSEING20 for 20% off. That code is now dead — CFI has replaced its standing 20% discount with a 30% one, AFF30. Self-Study goes from $497 to $347.90 and Full-Immersion from $847 to $592.90, both including the full FMVA certification. Two honest notes: if you used the old code you didn't actually lose money, because CFI's pricing page was already showing 20% off to everyone anyway — and this is a partner code, not something I negotiated just for you. It's simply 10 points deeper than what the site gives by default. Enter it at checkout.

🆕 New courses & updates

Udacity — Responsible AI: a new Nanodegree, three courses and three projects over about 45 hours, on the part of AI work that's quietly becoming a job title. It's about turning the EU AI Act and GDPR into actual engineering workflows — bias auditing, prompt-injection and RAG pipeline security, human-in-the-loop safeguards, data versioning. Worth knowing it's pitched at intermediate level and lists eight prerequisites, including Python and command-line comfort, so it isn't a first step. We've already reviewed it in full here if you want the honest read before you spend the time.

Educative — Master AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02): 204 lessons and a practice exam, but the reason to look at it is the 31 hands-on Cloud Labs — you're clicking around real AWS rather than watching someone else do it. About 20 hours. Educative shipped two new AWS labs alongside it as well, one building a RAG system on Bedrock and S3 Vectors. Cloud Practitioner is the entry-level AWS cert, so this is aimed at people starting out, not architects.

📰 In the news

Coursera is putting $100 million into a new AI-learning company founded by its own co-founder (Reuters) — Andrew Ng, who co-founded Coursera and taught the machine-learning course a good chunk of the industry started on, has launched LearnVector. Coursera's investment buys roughly a one-third stake. The pitch is learning that adapts to you as you go, rather than the prerecorded-lecture-and-quiz format Coursera itself made standard. It's worth paying attention to for one practical reason: when the company that defined the current model spends nine figures betting the next one looks different, the subscription you're weighing up today may be a different product in two years. Nothing changes this week — but it's the clearest signal yet of where this is heading.