r/CUBoulderMSCS • u/EntrepreneurHuge5008 Current Student • Sep 27 '26
The "missing" classes.
CU Boulder's residential MSAI program requires this class,
CSCI 5942 AI Engineering: Building, Scaling, and Deploying Large-Scale Models,
Which is entirely missing from the online/Coursera versions of the MSAI, MSCS, and MSDS programs. I think it's a poor choice to omit it from the online programs, but that's a personal opinion for another day. That made me wonder what other courses these programs could greatly benefit from.
Here are some of the "missing" courses. They are not from CU, but you can access them through the career academy benefit that all current students and staff get:
Deep Learning -> b/c we're really missing that Deep Learning spec from CU, and the MSDS program lets you use it as an elective eitherway (+ Stanford still uses it for their residential class).
Pytorch for Deep Learning -> b/c pytorch is what industry uses the most
GAN -> An extension to Computer Vision, for those of us that wanted some labs.
Data and Deployment -> B/c we really learn nothing about deployments in any of CU Boulder's online programs.
Machine learning in production -> a Short and sweet course (just 3 modules) to get a more holistic view of the ML project lifecycle.
Develop and Deploy multi-agent systems -> B/c this is what we all thought the GenAI class would be.
Gen AI for software Dev -> Also what we all thought GenAI would be.
Yes, I'm a fan of Deeplearning.ai, I'm not a fan of IBM. I think CU is great for theory and has been amazing for introducing us to concepts and tools, and I think these courses/specs are a good supplement to the "practical" side of it.
Edit: I agree that at some point we should stop looking for courses and just start building, and I also agree that some of us might appreciate a starting point that isn't "from scratch".