Good

good

good

good

good

Good

good

good

n

.

/

.

I

Overall, I was satisfied with the content of the course, but have some remarks to the pedagogical aspects of the course and structure.

Content really met, if not exceeded, my expectations. It puts Search Engine Optimisation in a easy to grasp perspective and really indicates the various trends that SEO school of thought underwent over time. It also makes it clear that it is not so much an academic discipline as it is practice oriented course. The course has for me (especially in the times of massive shifting of communication and outreach strategies online) become a huge benefit and a teaser to follow more courses on SEO &co. from UC DAVIS.

However, coming from a social science background with experience in online course design and pedagogy, I almost got put off by most of the content of week 1. I have ambitions in and passion for SEO, as well as science and communication, for which I regard the content of this course very, very, very useful!!

However, according to the profiling of an 'ideal SEO professional', I got a feeling I should not even try entering this domain. In many ways I do not identify myself with the 'ideal profile' of a potential SEO professional candidate that Rebekah May or Dave Lloyd would hire. Which I honestly think is a pity.

My commentary might be, therefore, coming from a slightly biased feeling of being excluded, true. I do not intend or desire to (at least in this moment) to work for or with any of them, however, as a valuable feedback from a social science oriented learner: There might be a lot of qualities, ways of thinking and ideas that by hiring the ideal archetype candidate would be lost. Perhaps I am not the most ideal audience for the course, however, my keyword research on what I need brought me to it.

Not to mention, if I had not truly had the desire to learn about SEO anyways, week 1 would have most likely been the last for me. This would have left the SEO professional domain in its static, solely pro-business oriented thinking.

Lesson learnt for me (and perhaps should be for the course instructors too): There's a lot to learn from other disciplines out there. Be it often the elitist social science way of critical thinking or pragmatic orientation of many business profit oriented activities. Not only online.

Anyways, thank you for this course. Although I perhaps was not intended to be your audience, I made it to the end and since week 2 have been really enjoying the content!

This was somewhat helpful. In general, I didn't find really useful information until course 2 began. However, it may be that I simply am not skilled enough in SEO yet to recognize the importance of finding out so much about its history.

One good thing about this course was helpful background on SEO that enabled one to immediately spot some old SEO practices that some sites still use, but quickly see these are no longer relevant. It may be helpful to understand why some poorly-managed sites are still doing them, however.

One thing I found unhelpful was lots of reading about, and attempts to get me into the discussion of the monetization of the Internet. For one thing, I'm hardly advanced enough in SEO to have any useful opinion on this matter, so it was both a waste of time and an encouragement to develop a largely ignorant opinion. (And once people develop opinions, they tend to fight over them, especially online, in utterly unhelpful ways). Second, for someone who wishes to get into SEO, this debate is irrelevant. It may have interesting philosophical value outside of your job, but the reality is the Internet IS optimized; like it or not. If you don't accept this, don't go into SEO.

Although history is one of my passions, and I found the long historical youtube video very interesting indeed, it was not actually relevant or valuable. As a professional educator coming to this course, I can spot make-work and filler gunk from a mile away.

As someone looking to switch industries and wanting to learn about all the basics of what an SEO should know, this course is not what I was looking for. For 49 USD I expected something with a little more meat and practicality instead of theory.

I appreciated the part about the history and how search engines changed and evolved over time the most. I disliked some of the parts about the section regarding how to get a job in the field. I feel it was irrelevant and bloated.

Rebekah is a great instructor, she paces her words well and speaks with high clarity. Aside from some mistakes in the transcript which threw me off a little at times, overall, she was a pleasure to listen to and learn from.

Some links are broken as of the time I took the course (6th Feb 2021). Sometimes reading materials given are so general like a whole Wikipedia page that I lose interest very quickly. Some videos are even 1 hour long. The thing is, these contents are considered 'unnecessary' as the info you get from them are not even going to be asked in the graded quizzes.

Conclusion: If you're looking for a crash course on SEO and want to learn how to use tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console, this is not the course for you.

Good information presented, but I can't get past the outdated teaching method of using the first 45 to 60 seconds of each video to talk about what the video is going to cover, then spending 30 seconds repeating those bullet points at the end of each video. Some videos are 4 minutes long, so more than half of the content is not actually content, it is essentially the instructor reading the outline for the upcoming content. It's a waste of both instructor and learner time. There are errors in the materials, and since there is no instructor feedback/interaction, there is no way to find out what was meant (including in reading assignments). All you can do is submit a ticket to get it fixed and hope that it gets corrected for the next people who take this course.

While this course is helpful to get started in learning about SEO, there are four quizzes that can only be unlocked if you pay for the class, not if you audit it. That is fine, but the course shows my progress as incomplete (0 out of 5 completed) but also shows I have finished 93% of the work because I have watched all the content and participated in all of the discussions. I don't mind that I am not earning any credit, but now it will just sit on my "in progress" course list. If I remove it, it will not show that I did make the effort of auditing the course. If courses are offered to be audited, there ought to be an ability to mark it as 100% audited.

Positives

A good place to start in relation to SEO. It gives you a basic overview of the history and development of the field as well the range strategies used in modern SEO. The video presentations are informative, clear and well-paced. If you have no real great understanding of how modern SEO works then it certainly delves deep enough to give you a better idea of whether it would be a career path you might want to follow.

Negative

Some of the supplementary reading material and videos can be a bit hit and miss in relation to their quality as educational or informational materials.

Much of the content could have been streamlined and better focused; I prefer if it was straight to the point, and clearly expressed the information that is important to me, instead of portraying the content in round-about ways.

Grammatical, stylistic and formatting errors were also plentiful in transcripts and quizzes; the superficial quality of the text really detracts from your brand's legitimacy and trustworthiness, as discussed in the final lecture.

Overall, I felt it was informative but definitely could have been significantly condensed for what it is.

I enjoyed learning some of the basics that I hadn't brushed up on like Core Web Vitals. But I found some of the resources recommended to be out of date or cost too much. Alexa doesn't even exist anymore and it's still being mentioned. Similarweb's free version is just a marketing pitch and Quantcast? Really can't use it without a pricey subscritpion. Also some of the questions in the quiz about personas just don't make much sense! The one about keywords and personas? The question itself isn't even clear. Let alone the answers.

Don't get me wrong. The course is a nice broad introduction. Rebekah May has a lovely way of teaching. However, the first "two weeks" are more of an HR commercial, advertising the SEO career than actually teaching relevant topics. Also "week two" with the co-professor is more than unnecessary and can be left out completely. The rest is (though it is very basic and starts from the very beginning) nicely explained and interesting. I am looking forward to watching the deeper modules and will continue to give this a chance!

The instructor was a bit dry and spoke VERY SLOWLY considering how little course material there was, course by course. There were many mentions of links to materials that I couldn't find within any of the downloads, and the readings were links to articles that were either too juvenile or too complex to follow, and didn't seem to actually apply to the coursework. Overall, I found what I learned interesting, but I wonder if the course could be polished and the readings be refreshed in the next sprint, as it were?

I would not say that this is a class for beginners. It is an introductory course for those who already are familiar with certain computer terms, programs, methods, etc. I learned a lot more than I thought I would. I had to research some of the terms used and ask a lot of questions with my family to understand what exactly some of this means. Just not a great course for 50+ year olds with no previous computer experience. A little off-putting.

But the class was challenging and the tests were a bit difficult.

Videos are pretty informative, especially in weeks 3 and 4. The first two weeks covered history of SEO and job market info, which I found less useful, although it gave me a more comprehensive picture of SEO in general. There's no technical info in this course. The additional readings are not useful (outdated, not well written, many ads on the blogs). The quizzes are okay, but some questions are poorly constructed. The course could be improved with much more interactivity and reinforcement of the concepts.