Learner Reviews & Feedback for Blockchain Basics by University at Buffalo

The necessity of tx hash root is unclear. What even are receipt root or state root? What is a state in Ethereum — that is not very clear to me after this course.

While speaking of UTXO in Bitcoin, it is not clear what that is. Too formalistic. I could look up the information, that UTXO are smt like chunks of txs and you cannot simply send 100BTC to smb — you need to collect the chunks on your address into 100BTC and direct any excess as a change to your own account to form a new UTXO

T​he course is a basic introduction to blockchain and covers a lot of basic concepts. The lectures are not "great", they are very short and cover very less content and that too not in deep. However, the optional links provided after lectures are very informative. They are time consuming but to understand the subject properly, they are necessary. Also, Links should be regularly updated and new links should be added so that if there is any new content, students are aware of it.

It was an OK class. In terms of content I think that the Blockchain Basics offered by LinkedIn was a bit better and more informative. The assignment at the end needs to be better maintained. I would swap out the old files in the project page for the newer ones in the resources page. I will say though that the assignment at the end really brought it together for me as I got to see how a blockchain interface behaved. So overall I still learned a lot.

Course was well structured, however, some of the key concepts could've been better explained. Especially the chain split concept for Ethereum. Videos in week 1 felt a little rushed, but the other modules were well paced. Nice collection of resources, but some of the links were dead (in Week 4) and links had resources that spanned other modules. Which isn't a bad thing, just caused a little bit of confusion when I organized my work.

Very well designed course. Teaches all the foundational knowledge of Blockchain needed to help you understand and navigate through the complex world of Blockchain. The jargon in blockchain doesn't feel alien to you after taking this course. If you want to explore the world of Blockchain, then this is the place to start. The only problem though is that the course is not up-to-date with the blockchain technology of the current day.

Decent beginning to your blockchain basics and to brush up fundamentals in case you have been reading up on blockchain projects. The last assignment is really what makes spend you a lot of time troubleshooting. Unless you are good at basic troubleshooting, you will struggle at the last step. The problem is not the difficulty of programming assignments, but the setup notes are insufficient to get a straight forward result!

This is a great course for blockchain beginners. The concepts are very clear and the references for understanding the concepts are exceptional. Even though there are miss calculations in the final project regarding the time required including the errors and delays for low-end laptops for the final project, the solutions are mentioned. And it also gave me an opportunity to understand even better while looking at the code.

I think the introductory part to this technology is great. So many misconceptions can arise when street people who think they know enough about bitcoin or ethereum advise peers about what they shoul be doing. I think this introductory course should be a must take for anyone dealing with anything about blockchain. Having said that, I would like more practice quizzes instead of some of the academic ones.

This is a great way to get started with Block Chain. The extra materials of the course will give you a more deep sense of the concepts that the course touches and they are several. Some of the transcriptions are inaccurate, but they are minor type-os. In general this course will give you the sufficient tools for you to understand and comprehend what Block Chains are all about. My score is 4.5

The lecture videos and additional material e.g. like white papers from Satoshi Nakamoto that are provided in the course give students the possibility to directly deep-dive into the most important publications of blockchain. Even though the lecture videos are quite short, it is a very good starting point for students who want to fully understand what's happing in the blockchain.

Interesting and informative, but a bit out of date. If the technology is as constantly changing as the course claims, then there shouldn't be articles and videos from 2017. Instructions for the set up of the final project seemed out of date as well, as many of the files I was expected to download and set up were not labeled the same as they were in the instruction document.

Good course for introduction but I guess not for total beginners, without any technical background.

1 star less for final task - except installing software (which could be difficult for sb who never done it before) task was pretty easy - just clicking according to instruction. Schema of working was shown but nothing else.

Also some external links do not work actually.

The final project of this course is not difficult once you get the environment setup. Some one from the uinversity needs to review the current status of the final project and make edits to the supplied setup files so fewer people have an issue. Also, there is definitely a RAM requirement which is not highlighted or stressed enough in the description of the course.

The content essenciatially is very informative, although there are multiple broken links to access complementary material (and even exercises), which is very disappointing. However, I still recommend this course for those who are interested in learning a little more about this subject, I hope this course gets more (the deserved) attention from its maintainers.

The course is amazing. The content covered is good as well. But I feel as if they could have explained some topics more clearly and in a little ore depth, or they shouldn't have introduced them in the first place. I do recommend this course, but remember, you will have to do a lot of googling alongside watching the course videos. The course is great, though!

Really liked the course a lot! had difficulty in the final project due to the huge download size. Instead of using a local VM, it would have been batter to use a Cloud VM, such as QwikLabs which ensure that the process is speedy and less time consuming.

I hope that this will be taken into consideration.

Nonetheless, the course was great! Thanks a lot!

The whole course was very informative. But the time i took to complete the quiz' in all the weeks is half of that i took to complete the programming assignment. The instructions should be modified and a video must be uploaded as a minimum requirement to provide us enough clarity. i am eagerly looking forward to continue with this specialization!

A nicely planned course, that helps beginners to learn and explore the basics of Block-Chain which in itself is quite a complex technology. For the project I would recommend following ALL THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY and also use the discussion forum to get rid of Errors. In the end, these Errors also teach you a lot of things. All the best.

This course provided knowledge about blockchain in a broad way. The whole technical concepts of blockchain wasn't fully covered and I had to google some things to fully understand it. I'd recommend people to read the white paper from Satoshi Nakamura (provided in week 1 of this course) as it helps you tremendously in learning blockchain

I would give this course a 5 star but the final assignment setup is confusing and there is hardly any clear guidelines on hoe to properly setup the environment to complete the assignment. Also the few tips that the TA provided are from a couple of years ago. Otherwise the content is a really great introduction to the world of crypto.

I enjoyed this course very much but at times it was very difficult to understand the teacher. I am dyslexic and this was a challenge at times. I did use a combination of reading and listening but sometimes it was not clear. I also enjoyed the extra resources provided by the course. Ill definitely continue my studies in this area.

This is surely one of the course which makes your fundamentals clear about blockchain, its working. I would like to say thanks to Coursera and Bina Ramamurthy. Content and speed is just perfect. Little knowledge checks on each chapter surely boost individuals confidence. and Last project assignment is just perfect nice finish.

This was a good course to get started with Blockchains, Though I had some difficulty in grasping the core concepts at start and still have a lot of questions that are unanswered, I guess the upcoming specialisation courses are going to answer them, Overall! a good high-level review course for beginners.Definitely recommended!

The final assignment was really useful to understand the block-chain system. However it is disadvantageous to those with weaker laptops or poor internet connectivity. The major concepts were explained well and the pace and structure of teaching was good. However some concepts could have been explained in detail.

Now i understand and can feel what blockchain is all about. The use of Ethereum blockchain as an example for the course has given extra motivation to learn more about blockchain other than just as a cryptocurrency token. however, i still have a lot of questions to ask in future quest for blockchain knowledge.