While I love Dr. van Lent's teaching style, I was somewhat disappointed in the course as a whole. After about the first week the instructor was not heard from again on the forums. It wasn't until about the last week that some official teaching staff started to make an appearance.

This was an issue as, especially in the first week, as there was a good deal of discrepancy between what was on the grading rubric, what was provided in description for the homework, and what was in an optional video that described the homework. All with no official direction as to what was correct, or how things should be properly graded. The students were just left to themselves to try and interpret what the instructor meant, and what was the proper thing to do in regards to the peer grading. This continued, albeit to a far lesser extent, through the remainder of the course.

While I don't expect instructors to be in the forums all that often, I do expect them to clear up obvious issues, and to make some type of official statement as to how students should proceed. I believe this was the first offering of this course, and I hope as it offered again those discrepancies are fixed, and perhaps more official teaching staff are able to monitor the forums.

As far as the material itself, it is pretty good, and covers most of the basics well. As I said at the start, I really love Dr. van Lent's teaching style. She is very encouraging, and easy to understand. She is also very human, making mistakes as she goes along, and correcting them. I feel this gives the student a good experience of the real world iterative process that coding is, that even with experience mistakes are still made, and to be expected, and how to go about doing some debugging to correct those mistakes.

Poor.

Course crammed with unnecessary details (loads of CSS "decoration" properties that one may test on it's own), without focusing on CSS fundamentals, such as page layout strategies, float-based layouts, element positioning which, in my view, are discussed only very superficially.

I'll forget 90% of discussed "decoration" properties in a few days but when I think of CSS paradigms - a structure that can be later filled with easily forgotten/easily retrieved "decoration" properties - that I'll take with me "for ever" out from this course.... sounds empty. The extra star goes for stressing the importance of accessibility.

To sum up: decoration largely outweighs structure.

This is not a self paced course. The material is presented in a confusing way, some of it's outdated as far back as 2013, there are many typos, some of the questions on the quizzes are hard to decipher and in at least one instance, the answer page didn't even match the question (week 2, #6). I posted a question on the forum, no one answered and there's no way to contact the instructor directly. This has been the most frustrating learning experience I've ever had.

The final assignment is peer graded, which means you'll have to deal with idiots grading your final assignment.

The peer graded assignments didn't prove to be quite productive.

The course videos didnt help much. The book was more helpful

lenghty

I think the grading should be more serious. I was quiet sure, to be honest, that my first homework wasn't correct and complete. And it's also too easy to copy work from another person. I graded a lot of work, many of them empy links, people asking for help, this course should be more serious. To me u$s 8 is a lot of money.

my final project grade not working

Is a excellent course