The last lab didn't run in the lab space nor locally. I had to rebuild it with create react app to match the setup. Nice test, but I am not sure if this blocker would be helpful other students.
Course has lots of interesting material, but so much of this is overshadowed by continuous streams of various technical and content-related issues, such as...
- Test questions with no right answer
- Blatantly incorrect statements, usually on exams/quizzes
- Lessons presented in the wrong order
- Not enough depth on important topics (for example, the basic React rendering cycle, especially with respect to performance dos and don'ts and tradeoffs)
- Lab code that doesn't work out of the box (bad NPM dependencies, faulty CSS)
- Randomly tossing 3rd party libraries into the lab and requiring the student to learn them on the fly. The portfolio project was more an exercise in Formik/Yup than it was in "Advanced React"
- Insufficient direction for assignment submission, resulting in various students submitting projects in different formats. Some were submitted as .rar files, so I had to download 3rd party software in order to extract them (please just accept .zip files only), some submissions don't even work.
- Grading criteria for peer-reviewing is a little weak. Many submissions have issues or other errors that would prevent them from ever being accepted in a professional setting, but because they pass all of the assignment's generic baked-in criteria, they are "passing"
- Ongoing plagiarism. Many submissions are clearly and obviously plagiarized, and it seems Coursera does very little to prevent this. This calls the entire validity of the course and its value into question, and dilutes the value of the certification. Plagiarized submissions also don't count towards your required 3 peer reviews, so every time you find a plagiarized one, you need to spend time reporting it, and then still do 3 more anyways.
