Very good course for the basic user. Even for a user that has a few months of experience with Linux servers, there are some things to learn.
Overall poorly scaffolded learning with little practical value.
The lectures were the best part, though the instructor brought up very complex topics without diving into them. There were some good resources and links to documentation, but just reading docs would have been more valuable than the class, which doesn't cover anything in much depth.
The assessments were terribly written, consisting of several multiple choice questions that often tested irrelevant trivia rather than important concepts (e.g. "what is the name of XYZ distribution's tool for ABC?", rather than "what is a secure procedure for doing ABC?"). The final project was poorly specified: beyond the usual "make reasonable assumptions to fill in the gaps", it didn't even specify what certain types of end users were trying to do in the system it asks you to design. The peer grading instructions did not provide a good rubric or example answers for orienting one's judgement and expectations of other students answers. All in all, as a former teacher, it feels as if the assessments were likely banged out by an inexperienced TA in an afternoon.
Lastly, for this type of course, it's inexcusable that prebuilt virtualized environments and practical problems weren't provided or used in excercises. I came to this course as a developer looking to broaden my ops side experience; I know that the way everyone in industry actually learns things is by experimentation, trial and error. A strong course would have practical labs to create and then pen test the security features discussed; it might ask students to spin up broken images, investigate problems, and fix them to a specification. I've frequently done similar training at tech conferences; it's not hard to design this. Unfortunately, the course design smacks of laziness and unwillingness to put together the materials necessary to actually have students learn and retain the topics.
