Learner Reviews & Feedback for IT Security: Defense against the digital dark arts by Google

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I appreciate all who tried their best to make this course, but it just didn't work out for me as well as i wanted. I feel like i didn't retain much information, and that a lot of words and topics were thrown at me so quickly. There were virtually no useful or practical things to do to help us learn hands on either. There were also a lot of things that were not explained properly in depth and that are skimmed over. There are even things mentioned in previous lessons or sections that we don't learn about until much later, but is also glossed over a bit. I dont mean to bash the instructors and the other people behind the scenes who put this together, but at a certain point, i honestly just downloaded the text from the videos to teach myself better. Some videos is someone just reading the text with no prompts or diagrams for 7+ minutes, and videos that have prompts are...almost useless to be honest. I appreciate the attempt at diagrams, but they're not really useful to follow along that much. Anyway, there's more to unpack but my fingers hurt lol. There was some good, like i learned a lot of cool stuff, even tho little portions of the information wasn't useful to my graded quizzes. I hope this course works out for any others that wanna try it. its good to get your feet wet in IT.

-Not very well structured; probably you could categorize better the topics of weeks 5 and 6. For example, the steps of incident handling are not very clearly differentiated: I assume they are detection, contention, correction, and testing... but I could also set analysis and recovery as separate steps.

-Some topics include too much in-depth information, like different forms of authentication, making it difficult to discriminate important information and technical details. Also, the way they are presented makes difficult to differentiate which of them are intended for authn., for authz. or for both.

-Final project evaluation was disappointing. I spent several days working and researching just to find out that I could had input "lorem ipsum" in the textbox to get approved. I expected some specific feedback or peer reviews like in other courses.

I found this course experienced issues similar to the The Bits and Bytes of Computer Networking course. The content covered is mostly fine. There seems to be a tendency to cover too many concepts at once, then to either gloss over complicated concepts or to focus on them for a significant portion of the module. I found this often meant I was stuck in certain areas.

This was not helped by the quizzes which sometimes have poorly worded questions and ambiguous answers. Even in content I felt confident with, I often had to repeat quizzes due to lack of clarity in the questions and/or answers.

Overall, it is worth completing this course. I found it to be the most frustrating course out of the five IT courses. The content is worth learning and I hope the course can be reviewed to provide a better learning flow.

I understand that the course only meant to serve as a jumping point but some retrofit is needed in terms of preparation and course work. Some areas are too vague and doesn't allow significant resources other than what is suggested on wikipedia and similar sites. Not alot of people tend to complete readings as a resource considering that they are paying for it each month as well.

Work on improving word assignments. Often times its too vague and doesnt provide enough details or the requirements/limitations. Provide a sample submission or document, this i'm seeing people strugglign with because they still dont understand the concepts laid out by the course.

More animation would be appreciated as it helps in understanding like how the hardware and even software works as just by reading it doesnt help much anyhow i have to google it again to understand it in a better way. And i even think that explanation was not up to the mark as it lagged in the detail explanation it was like he explained things just from the surface like in wep he didnt explain like how eavesdropper is able to watch on communication between access point and user with shared key and in the same topic he didnt explained why we need two same encryption message to recover the shared key

The course content and material was well prepared but I would strongly suggest this in the future delivery of the course. I personally suggest going more in depth of those terminology rather than just briefly explaining them in just 6-10 mins video should help more for an individual with 0% knowledge on IT security. It wasn't so much of challenge to me because of my pervious experience with IT security but newbies would definitely find it hard to follow in the course perfectly. Just my own thoughts.

Thank you

Too much of camera work and the shot of instructors, who is reading the texts. The texts sounded like more in a written-format, which is a little bit hard to understand by listening to the instructor. The visual slide should be presented longer while the instructor is explaining the material. More slides could be utilized to help us understand complicated terms, systems and protocols. Also that way, I think it would be easier for the learners to memorize via visual in addition to the aural discussion.

Overall this is a decent overview of security topics. I think the videos could be improved - there are too many 'talking heads' and not enough diagrammatic explanation. Also, the transcripts vary in places from what the speaker is saying - I suspect they are being created automatically.

I had no problems with the online labs, although I think that some instructions might cause learners difficulty whose first language is not English.

I was looking forward to this course yet it was very disappointing that the instructor's delivery of the course was from a textbook. very hard to understand the content delivered unlike the previous courses in this certificate, not enough practical exercises as well, and feeling like i need to find and do another security course elsewhere

Even though it shared a lot of information I believe that it needs to be updated with current and more relevant material. The instructor read off a lot of information that was given to him obviously but it needs to be a little better. I hate to say that I actually lost interest half way through the course.

Technical details on encryption algorithms and cypher methods to secure a network/IT infrastructure; Antivirus/malware detection and prevention; Disk encryption and growing a security-oriented company culture; All these aspects are interesting and useful to know from the Tech support role POV;

you really should use more animations in order to convey an abstract or conceptual point. when looking up the different types of encryption on wikipedia, they do a better job demonstrating it. where as, you guys do a better job of explaining the encryption process.

It's a good course, but not very comprehensive; they lay a lot of terms on you one right after the other and barely explain each one. Learning material is subpar at best as well; visuals are few and far between and many aren't properly marked or explained.