Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Cybersecurity Tools & Cyber Attacks by IBM

informartove

not so good

GOOD...

NIce

ok

I was disappointed to see how little effort was put in to design this course. I was expecting more since this course seemed to get a decent rating based on Coursera user feedback. The course provides some very helpful resources to go back to later when learning more about cybersecurity and keeping up with the most up to date news and research. The course attempts to teach important concepts, but the lecture delivery method is just poor.

For starters, the video lecture designs were just sloppy -- poor audio recordings, typos on the slides and in the written transcripts, slide graphics were not visible most of the time (even when viewing in full-screen mode). Many acronyms and terms were not clearly defined or defined at all. This should be a number 1 priority for a beginners' course. The written transcripts for each of the lecture slide simply just transcribed the audio and did not correct any transcription mistakes when they appeared. There should also be helpful written guides creating outlines for each of the units and the terms/concepts presented.

This course has a 7-day free trial, but I canceled before the trial was over. It is not worth paying for something where there is clearly very little effort put into making the course.

Overall disappointed because I expected more from IBM since they have top experts in this field.

I signed up for the 7 Day Free Trail for the IBM Cyber-security Analyst Professional Certificate. This is definitely a cert I would be interested in completing but unfortunately the lecture audio is so bad that I will have to un-enrollment as I can't justify shelling out $49 per month for such terrible and unclear audio quality and instructors. The material itself seems interesting but I literally cannot hear or understand 75% of what the presenter is trying to say in the lectures. I tried turning on the subtitles but that's just no way to learn... Unfortunate because I think this certification path has potential but I could literally create a YouTube video on my $300 laptop with no special equipment that would sound better than what IBM is putting out here. I bought a Security+ course on Udemy for $9.99 and it seems to basically have all the same type of material plus the lecture audio / instructor is clear and concise in their presentation.

This course is very summary-level. After taking, I realized the whole specialization/certificate would likely provide only a cursory overview of the field, and nothing close to what would be required get a job in this area. I think one could learn more about cybersecurity from perusing wikipedia than they could with this course.

Additionally, this course seems hastily put together, with many different speakers from lesson to lesson. Each host offers a wildly different level of knowledge and didactic ability. I get the feeling the lessons were spliced together from some sort of internal training process, where the cyber team was trying to educate management and other departments on what exactly they do.

The arbitrary nature of quiz questions reinforces the idea that not much thought was put into the overall informational value of this course.

This was a challenge. Between the Audio issues and some of the Translations and the Dialects, OMG I was so over it. I had to go over this several times. This was a complete Headache. I was stressed and constantly SMH. I just wanted this to be over with. I was really hoping for the better. The best part of all of this was the lady that comes on for the Introduction. She was so very clear and speaks very well. Please please get instructors to have visuals with Most of the lessons and have more content relevant to the Quiz/Practice Questions. I feel for the Translators. This was challenging but I got through it and I am extremely reluctant on completing another course. Thank you for your time and consideration.

The quality of the video lecture is quite bad. Some lectures have inaudible parts. This is made worse as the slides are not comprehensive on their own. The video lectures are not engaging. The presentations are frequently not smooth. The presentation style is more suited for conference presentation and not helpful for lesson lecture. Frequently, a static slides is shown and voiced over for more than 2 minutes. Some animations may be good for highlighting important parts and capturing audience attention. An ok course if you just wanna sit back, relax and get an impression of the topic. But if you are serious about learning cybersecurity, this does not make for a pleasant experience.

The speech to text within the course was not really all that great and there was no addendum's or corrections to these mistakes. Further, the instructor did make a few mistakes which was also not rectified. To which I only picked up while I was listening to a cyber security audio book, Dawn of the Code War. I highly recommend that these are fixed and I hope that this doesn't occur on the courses where you can complete a capstone project? The information contained and progression on this was good and hopefully will have given me a good foundation for when I go to apply for the Applied Technology Focusing in Cyber Security Degree next year.

Cheers, Brendon

I'm now one week in and I have to say I was surprised about the poor quality of the course. the information within the course is good although some things aren't really regarded as basics BUT all videos so far are with poor audio quality, and just a few powerpoint slides with some pictures of graphs.. I feel like I'm in university again. it's hard to enjoy the content cause it's so "black and white" and not engaging enough. it would be great to have better prepared courses in which maybe the people directly talk to you via good quality video and audio so you feel more inclined to follow what they say.

[Poorly produced videos - Horrible audio. Verbose and confusing grammar from some speakers]

The audio quality of the video, specially the presenters, are often bad as I mentioned in my comments on each. The delivery as well needs your close attention as more often the way the presenters speak were not intelligible and verbose. I heard sniffing sounds and encountered varying volume levels on speakers' presentation, made worse by wrong grammatical expressions. I can't help but replaying the videos of skipping them.

The content needs updating as I saw slides dated 2018.

The content of the course is good, without a question. But the way it's presented is not the kind i would expect it from a company like IBM. The sound quality of half of the videos is very poor. Sometimes it sounds as if it was recorded during a long distance phone call. One video obviously was recorded in an office while a tenacious visitor standing outside keeps knocking on the door. As most of the content is delivered by those videos, at most half of them in bad quality and hard to understand it does not really encourage you to keep on learning.

The course relies on memory, not understanding. The audio was almost unintelligible, at times it sounded as if the lecturers were speaking from a satellite phone.

The course jumped from being extremely slow, in the first modules, to reliance on understanding of abbreviations that sometimes only have relevance in the US. There was little mention of European contrasts.

The assertion that this course requires little or no background knowledge is false. It’s a good job that I had years of prior experience in this field.

If I hadn't already taken the Open P-tech course I wouldn't have gotten very much from this one. It was difficult to understand many of the speakers and the transcripts were poorly done. I got more clarity on many topics from notes from the other P-tech course and simply by doing Google search on others. IBM should not allow this course to be published as is. However, I did learn a few things I didn't get from the other course hence 2 stars rather than none.

There are quite a few errors in the written translation where the words in the written translation are not what was said by the presenter. The course was tedious. Some of the speakers were hard to understand and were not very good at oral presentation. There was too much overlap and the course could be substantially shortened without losing the core information convey in the course. I was disappointed by this course and had expected that it would be better.

This course is not sufficiently polished to be worth the Coursera subscription fee. The low quality of the audio recordings for the presentations, the standard of written English and attention to detail make this a flawed product. From the course forums I note these issues have been raised by other students previously with apparent minimal improvement. As a world leading company IBM should take ownership and address these issues if they value their brand.

I feel I could have finished faster if the voice overs were more clearer. Even with the subtitles, it would show inaudible. I had to replay the videos several times. I learned a lot, but I feel the voiceovers could have a better script instead of just speaking normally as they would with their friends. I really was trying to finish within 7 days for my free trial, but took longer than it should have, which is very frustrating.

Good Intro but not getting deep enough as I have expected. There are no tools with which interact/train with, such as SIEM apps (OSSIM) for instance.

Honestly I wouldn't have paid the price if I could realise in advance that a high portion of the thematic could be read out from Wikipedia.

It is perfect for new students, it gives a good overview of the principles though.

There Is 2 lecturer I don't remember their name.The Speech Quality Not so good as i expected.The Senior One talk like he can't talk properly. Believe me when he was talking i just pause the Video read the subtitles under the video and searched google and understand the Topics.So please make the voice and sound clear so that the topic can be learned perfectly.

I have learned from course, however it has been more of going to Google and Wikipedia to understand further. Some links, data are really helpful in course, however quality of audio and visuals could have been much more better.

Audio specifically has created a lot of nuisance, and someone from Coursera should consider redesigning the course content .

To make the course more accessible, the transcript ought to be reviewed by a human being. Automatic transcription is clearly not up to the task when some speaks English with a thick Spanish accent.

Duplicate information between section could be removed too.

Some real-life examples would have been a useful supplement to this mainly theoretical course.

Many presenters are hard to understand, and the transcripts don't help (they include words like [inaudible], so you can't even rely on the transcripts). It's kind of a joke. In addition, you definitely need some IT background for this. I had to look up acronyms in almost every video for the last 2 weeks.

Clearly some internal training has been re-hashed (no pun intended) for external use. Slides includes typos, speakers mumble and the transcripts haven't been QA-ed. A number of the questions in the Module 1 quiz in fact are covered until Module 4, which shows what little time has been spent finessing this.