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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Blockchain Basics by University at Buffalo

4.6
stars
7,507 ratings

About the Course

This first course of the Blockchain specialization provides a broad overview of the essential concepts of blockchain technology – by initially exploring the Bitcoin protocol followed by the Ethereum protocol – to lay the foundation necessary for developing applications and programming. You will be equipped with the knowledge needed to create nodes on your personal Ethereum blockchain, create accounts, unlock accounts, mine, transact, transfer Ethers, and check balances. You will learn about the decentralized peer-to-peer network, an immutable distributed ledger and the trust model that defines a blockchain. This course enables you to explain basic components of a blockchain (transaction, block, block header, and the chain) its operations (verification, validation, and consensus model) underlying algorithms, and essentials of trust (hard fork and soft fork). Content includes the hashing and cryptography foundations indispensable to blockchain programming, which is the focus of two subsequent specialization courses, Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications (Dapps). You will work on a virtual machine image, specifically created for this course, to build an Ethereum test chain and operate on the chain. This hands-on activity will help you understand the workings of a blockchain, its transactions, blocks and mining. Main concepts are delivered through videos, demos and hands-on exercises....

Top reviews

TT

Nov 18, 2018

This is an introductory course to Blockchain. The supplemented material (in other words self-study) is excellent and in my opinion is the only way to master the concepts and details of this discipline

U

Dec 31, 2019

One of the Best course for Absolutely Beginners :-) Discussed Core Fundamental Factors of Blockchain of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Amazing Resources & Really Helpful Content. Thanks Bina Ramamurthy Ma'am.

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1801 - 1825 of 1,877 Reviews for Blockchain Basics

By JIAN C Y

Jun 22, 2020

It quite hard to understand

By Ruiming D

Jul 28, 2018

Maybe too high level for me

By Mayank M

Apr 23, 2020

nice course for beginner

By Nam H

Jun 18, 2018

Ok, it's a good overview

By Md. F M

Jul 19, 2020

It's a good course.

By 大可劉

Jul 15, 2020

... Too simple

By Clot J

Feb 11, 2021

Basics only

By Nafis F T

Aug 14, 2023

Good

By Muhammad A M

Jul 19, 2022

good

By Joerg F

Mar 2, 2021

After terminating another Coursera course (Applied Machine Learning in Python) which I found too difficult to be considered a medium difficult course, I found this one too easy.

Also, I didn't like the mixture between very short videos with a - sorry - strange tutor that most of the time didn't look at you (because of the camera angle, I found this very disturbing) and a whole bunch of reading material where a lot of the links didn't work anymore. It gave me the impression, that this course has been compiled without putting very much effort into it and there is no regular checking whether the linked material is still available.

The tests were a joke, they often just had 3 or 4 questions.

Then - in the final "programming exercise" you had to install a virtual box in the commercial software VirtualBox. VirtualBox as a prerequisite to successfully complete this course was never mentioned in any of the previous sessions. Luckily I already had a working VirtualBox installation on my private PC. (On my company PC, the admins would never install VirtualBox due to security reasons.) It would have been very frustrating if I had found out in week 4 that I was not able to complete the course. At least the environment in that "Ethereum" virtual machine was working fine and was very convinient to use.

By Robert S

Oct 31, 2021

If your going to have someone just read an English script, why select someone who you can't understand? It's extremely frustrating. Videos are incomprehensible and it goes from 0-100 extremally quick. Download the suggested reading material first and study it before going to the videos. I ended up just re-typing the video scripts and reading them myself instead of trying to comprehend the reader. This course explains everything you need to know about the blockchain, but you have to do a lot of work to put it in order and actually understand what their trying to explain. It's obvious that that there was no case studies on how effective this course was put together or arranged before making it public. I gave it two stars instead of one, only because the material is there, its just a mess for the user to decipher it all. If the course instructor could speak clear and concise English, I would of bumped this up to 4 stars.

By Khalid A A

Jun 20, 2020

This is a good attempt of an online course. There were lots of broken links on the reading information. In addition, I saw many questions that are not answered by the course moderators. Furthermore, the last part of the course which was the final assignment was methodical in the first part but after that, the information was not provided on what to do next, so I had to relay on my background information to finish the assignment, which is not the correct methodology in my opinion for a fair evaluation. Minor improvement is required in my opinion. Thank you for the information and good luck.

By Tymoteusz M

Aug 13, 2022

I often found the instructor overexplained obvious high level elements but the explanation for topics that require good explanations were unclear. For example, 'Securing Blockchain' (week 3) video was incomprehensible to me. Example 2 could be the Robustness video which didn't explain well how the longest chain wins solution works which is what the video is really about. The instructor ofen just reads out the slides. The resources are a collection of links. The standard of this course is lower than usual for Coursera.

By matteo b

May 3, 2021

Lessons take 10 minutes only and students have to ready everything by them self. Video lessons are not enough to give a good understand of the topic (they shouldI

99% of the time is spent reading documentation and paper (no written by Professor). Time to read documentation is under estimated. Usually a course helps to speed-up the learning process. That's not the case of this course.

The list of documentation is enough, in this case Professor support (lessons) is useless.

By Akshat A

Mar 6, 2021

The. study material is good, but that's about it. Several links in in the course and quizzes are dead. The final assignment is a nightmare to set up and run (I'm using a 2.6GHz i7,16GB macOS), but is a piece of cake to actually get graded. I think if as an alternate to setting up the whole VM etc we could also get the code repo to actually run and tinker with on our own, I'd give it another 2 stars.

By Saied

Apr 27, 2020

Although I respect the lecturer and the effort they have made to make this a useful course but compared to many other courses on Coursera, I don't think this is a good course. The teaching material is not well-organized. The teaching method is not smooth and fluent. The accent of speeches is a bit Indian and the speaking intonations are awful. It's like she is reading from a PowerPoint presentation.

By shahar k

Jul 25, 2019

all this "Module Objective" and "summary" on each session is very old fashioned, specially as many of the goals are "Be able to discuss...". while next to the goal follows just elaboration of some specs...

I think the course is ok if you want a glimpse about the field and get familiar with the technical vocabulary, but for really learning I would advice looking elsewhere.

By Noah D

Jul 25, 2021

While video lessons were helpful, assignments/quizzes were pretty bland and final assignment did not function properly so was unable to submit. A bit misleading on assignment/quiz time - 4 multiple choice questions shouldn't be listed as 30 minutes of work. Overall, it's an ok starter course but needs some work.

By Vinit K P

Aug 24, 2021

Some of the terminologies used in the video are directly used without prior explanation which makes it really difficult to understand. I had to frequently visit the web to understand the technical terminologies that were used directly. Anyways, the resources attached with the course are awesome.

By sabri b

Feb 26, 2022

certains passage sont top, et ensuite ils nous renvoient vers des sites pour faire de la lecture... si c'est pour faire de la lecture je n'ai pas besoin de cela, je peux aller seul m'instruire.

je m'attendais plus à une vrai formation, quelqu'un qui explique les choses etc...

By Harsh S (

May 3, 2020

The video lectures in this course are too short and laconic. Most of the things are provided as reading material of other blogs and articles already available. There is barely any point of doing this course. Just read online articles and you'll know everything in this course!!

By Pablo O O B

Aug 25, 2020

I'm sorry, but I need to be honest. The course does not meet my expectations. The subject is complex and the course does not provide a clear and easy intro to the subject. I was able to finish it because I had some previous knowledge on the subject.

By Alexandru B

Oct 9, 2020

More than half of the reading links are dead, the assignment is throwing an error that many people are getting and nobody seems to be answering the forum. It's a dead course imo, I regret starting it, I should've searched for a newer one

By Yousif A

Mar 18, 2021

The quizzes are somewhat weak, and some questions have weird wording. Overall, it's an okay intro I guess. I didn't like the corpro-training style videos and staging backgrounds.

By Jasveer S

Feb 22, 2024

vocals wasn't matching the visual presentation for most of parts. Needed to stop the video and read the transcript then rewind the video n play.