As a complete and utter beginner to IT, I feel like all of the information presented in this course is in a backward and awkward way. Everything feels so segmented that I'm having a lot of trouble putting it all together in the correct way. There doesn't seem to be a natural flow to any of the lessons and it feels more like a professional stating something than actually teaching it. I've had to completely use outside sources for how to actually do the Peer Review assignment. I feel like all the learning I've done is from hearing about it here and researching it elsewhere.

Poor designed course with lots of meaningless talk, lack of example and practice, key to pass the test is memorize terms.

The course videos are so awkwardly robotic. Maybe if the instructors were not made to read it like that and say it in a more relaxed manner it would be better.

I don't usually submit reviews, but it was very surprising to see so many negative reviews for this course. I want to clarify this for the others who are skeptical about taking this course. Please go ahead and take the course, because this course is THE BEST in Networking for beginners. Yes, the course does involve the instructor talking a lot, but it also has animated slides representing whatever he explains and practical tests to implement whatever knowledge you have gained. It is very important to TAKE NOTES and revise, and not simply watch the videos because nothing is going to get into your head by doing so. It is an entire subject and has been taught in an excellent way, you can't expect yourself to remember everything just by simply watching the videos. I was very scared of Networking until I landed up in this course. I love it now. It just takes some interest, patience, understanding skills and taking notes to complete this course successfully.

I did not get an opportunity to study Networking in college, but really needed to learn it as a Computer Science student. I am very grateful to Coursera and Google for offering this amazing course, that taught all the basics that is needed for an undergraduate student to know. Learning the same syllabus in college would have taken an entire semester, but I got done with it in a week during this quarantine period. I wasn't planning on taking the entire specialisation because my aim was to just learn Networking. But now I am very eager to learn the remaining stuff too!

I would like to specially thank the instructor Mr. Victor Escobedo, who is the best course instructor I have ever come across on Coursera! The eternal smile on his face, friendly tone and frequent Networking puns make the course all the more interesting and easy. All the other Google employees who made special appearances in this course also seemed so cool, that made me wonder what an amazing experience it would be to work with such people around everyday.

Thanks a lot to my instructor Mr. Victor, Google and Coursera!

Reading a teleprompter is not exactly teaching.

I find myself using other sources since everything is so badly explained.

The quizzes have questions about things we are told about in passing.

Many of the workshops do not work at all or require a special work around to get working at all.

Very disappointed in this course.

Do not pay for this.

The delivery format needs dire quality control. I don't want to see some random guy talking and would rather see some actual slide to show calculations and step by step guide

While I think that I have learnt a great deal of acronyms in this course, I feel that it has in NO WAY prepared me to be able to troubleshoot network issues. There is absolutely no practical knowledge & no virtual hands-on troubleshooting. There is no "steps" on how to do anything. For example: a section on Host Files. I spent 10 minutes trying to find host files on my home computer. nothing! All these tools were are told about, but the information on how to use them is sorely lacking. I was hoping after the vague knowledge that was given to us in the first course, that the second would be more in depth. Not. This has been a big disappointment thus far.

Not explained well and could use more visual aids to help explain.

SUPER dense material, compressed down into bite sized videos make this a very tough course to pass. There was a lot of explanations with very few examples and visual aid. To pass, i did A LOT of research on my own because what was being taught to me didn't make sense or it wasn't sinking in. The concepts they present to you are very poorly explained. While the topic as a whole has gotten me very intrigued, this class could have been constructed and presented better.

I understand that the material was dense and so they tried to break it down into smaller chunks, but everything was so poorly explained that fitting the parts together was next to impossible. There were not enough good examples given and almost no tie in to how we actually experience the internet, just an endless wave of acronyms, numbers, and technical terms that may or may not have been relevant to the quizzes. I hope the other courses in this program are not as scatterbrained as this one.

This course was EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to understand. Prepare to do a lot of research outside of this course, which does not help as well. The first course of the certificate was easy to follow, but this course is way too advanced for people with no IT background. I don't understand how people are giving this course more than 1 star because it is theory-dense with a lot of new terms that are not even explained properly throughout the course. This course is the same as the typical college courses where profs just read off slides without caring to explain what they're reading.

Too much detailed a topic to just have some body narrate the entire course. A few visual displays with audio and activities helps make the course more enjoyable and easy to absorb and understand material

This was a very fun course! I really enjoyed the style and pace of the information given. A lot of technical information was given while the course made it easy to take in and comprehend the material!

I loved this course. When I had issues support was awesome sauce. I really enjoyed the puns this instructor used to keep you from going off in a daze. I really wish I would have found Coursera sooner.

A lot of information, but i feel like i fully understand core networking concepts. A lot of this info has helped me comprehend what will be required for me when I take my Network + certification exam.

Great course. It is great for beginners and for people that may have forgotten a thing or two. The way it was taught makes it so much better than reading man pages or something else as dry and boring.

I am not happy with this course for the following reasons:

1.Lack of visual aids in lessons.

2. Teaching pedagogy depends on lecture manner without students interaction.

3. There are not any presentation slides (PPTX) for the videos or lessons.

4. Quizzes are completion sentences and this is not a valid evaluation.

5. This course is full of definitions that could be clarified in a better way than that one exists.

I think Google should revise this course and re-structure it.

Really dry, Lack of interaction. There is just this guy talking to you reading of a screen

I can just say that at the beginner level this is really hard material to comprehend, they assume some parts of the network bits that you understand, which as you will notice that is not the case, now for someone who has some network background this might come off more familiar. Very often I would refer to other sources in order to understand the lesson better, which is always welcomed, but here I couldnt understand nothing on the first try.

Suffice to say it will give you good knowledge and fundamentals about how network/networks work but be prepared to review same lessons multiple times and to use google on certain occasions to make things easier to understand.

For me, it was difficult to understand and grasp the technical aspects of the content. I wish there were more metaphors or infographics to better explain the heavy technical content.

what an amazing course, so much information and yet so easy to understand, would recommend going over a few of the videos and supplemental reading a few times, take the time needed, it'll be worth it.

Apply yourself to these terms and concepts and you will gain knowledge that is presented in a very understandable way. Watch and rewatch the course videos and I promise it will all start making sense!

The course had some ups and downs, but it was a good challenge and I did it! I learned so much and I never knew I could do this kind of course. I have gained so much knowledge now from when I started.

The first course on IT Fundamentals felt way to easy, but at least had some hands-on labs. This second course had way more challenging information, but zero hands-on. I would like the courses to be balanced more between the two, but all-in-all this was a really good, informative course.

If, like me, you don't have much of a tech background, there is a very steep learning curve between the first and second course of the specialization. This covers a lot of information, but breaks it down in what I found to be a manageable format. Not easy by any stretch of the imagination (if you take notes and study them, you will easily hit 8-10 hours of work per week), but manageable. I found the material interesting and the instructor clear and engaging (albeit corny at times). I picked up a CompTIA Network+ book on a whim about halfway through the course and already knew quite a bit of the material, which was a nice little confidence boost.

The only thing that bothered me a bit was the grading--almost everything is 100% or failure. Honestly, I probably would have retaken things until I got 100% anyway, but when you're doing a module mid-quiz and have to start from scratch 10 problems in for one mis-click, it's a little annoying. The grading rubric for the peer graded assessment also really doesn't address the prompt at all. Very few of the papers that I read were anything more than a list of definitions with no attempt at explaining how the layers interact with each other.