I really enjoyed everything about this course. I thought the exercises/quizzes were fair and the instructor showed me many things that will serve me well going forward. Great course, great instructor!
tl;dr: I do NOT recommend this course. It is riddled with errors. Additionally, you risk not getting your certificate based on wrong information given to your peers to grade you for your final.
This course has multiple errors in the quizzes and most egregiously in the instructions to your peer reviewers to grade your final project. All throughout the forums were people pleading with students not to mark them wrong based on the grading instructions but grade them based on the instructions to complete the final project.
Here is a post in the forum. It is one of many and she explains it better than I can.
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Typos and errors in quizzes and final project! Frustrating.
Michelle SchauerWeek 3 · 12 days ago · Edited
I was quite surprised at how often I found grade-critical typos and errors in the quizzes and final project. I checked other students' comments and saw that other students are frustrated about this also. Not good. There are quiz question-and-answer errors which are incorrect.
There are a couple of errors on the final project. For example, the instructions say to create an unordered list (HTML course). Then the peer review questions to correct another peer's work asks if the person created an ORDERED list. If they didn't, we're supposed to dock them a point for their "error". The peer review question SHOULD ask if the person created an unordered list, as the instruction clearly stated.
Examples of typos within quizzes:
<o> (incorrect) instead of <ol> (correct - should have been this)
<nag> (incorrect) instead of <nav> (correct - should have been this)
There were quite a handful of errors similar to this on other quizzes as well. Frustrating when you're trying to learn and be tested fairly on your retention.
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Additionally there doesn't seem to be any TA's or active involvement from the teacher. I've loved the Dr. Chuck courses from UMich but this course was terrible. It's a complete lack of respect for the open learning community to create a course, not test it for errors, and then have students beg in the forums for corrections and changes to something they paid for and have it be ignored. I'm paying for the Specialization and I have nothing but dread going into the rest of courses. Please look for a better option. The book, Learn to Code HTML & CSS, by Shay Howe was the best thing to come out of this. It's free on his website and I got more out this than the lectures. The teacher is just reading her slides and not very interactive. The book has codepen examples throughout and you'll get far more interactive learning by working through the chapters than sitting through the lectures.
