Decent course, I just find it frustrating and strange that so many introductory concepts and foundational topic are over-looked and skipped throughout the course. For example, there were a lot of important terms that I believe is crucial to explain to students, such as, what is a server, what is a network, what is a datacentre, what is a system in I.T? Even though I have no problem with learning what these terms are on my own, I feel like the course would have more depth and be more meaningful if there was a foundational for learners to build on, obviously if every learner learns this knowledge on their own, you might have gaps in learners' understandings of how these all relate to cloud computing. For example, I didn't know what the difference is between a cloud environment and cloud computing, perhaps it could just be a personal lack of knowledge on this domain, but I still think it would be valuable for the learners to have a bottom-up understanding of everything.

The course was overall decent, I don't have any other complaints, some of the content was too fast in the final week, cloud security concepts was talked about as if students should have already done their own research regarding cloud security, which once again, references my first complaint. I do still appreciate the opportunity to enrol and take this course, as I learnt a lot of new information. It was fascinating to learn about cloud computing models, services, environments and all the other things, I enjoyed this course, just wish that they took more time to break down the concepts into more understandable and beginner-friendly material.

Conclusion: Take this course, it is definitely worth your time and IBM are champions for making these course available to us on Coursera, as well as Coursera for providing the platform to unify their courses.

Thank you IBM and Coursera, I'll always be grateful for these lessons and material.

In terms of when I did my best learning of the material, I found the portions where an apparent field expert used diagrams to develop a concept to be the most effective. I enjoyed the logical layout of the material complete with the 'use cases'.

In terms of where I feel inadequately prepared to act on this new knowledge. I think that the class material was light on practical applications. I felt as I did in most undergraduate courses that I took in Brick-and-Mortar institutions. It 'seemed and felt' as if a lot of material was covered and that I should be thereafter edified on a subject, but the reality was that the information was not actionable and my education consisted of discombobulated facts, unintegrated and with no practical use what-so-ever.

I am taking into consideration that there is apparently a tremendous amount of collaboration and technologies that must be mastered in order to truly understand how to create and navigate an understanding of distributed microservices that can scaled dynamically.

I am taking into consideration that perhaps the course creators did not want to bog down the student with information that could be learnt in its ideal context later in the specialisation.

I hope that the other courses in the specialisation add more levels of practicality to the experience. I don't think I could survive another institution taking my money and giving me unactionable/useless information and telling me that it is my ticket to success.

This is a great introductory course into Cloud Computing. It is obvious IBM and their people behind the project have worked really hard to create amazing content. The video lectures are quite good with the icons and voice overs. I deducted two stars because of the pedagogy of the course. Firstly, there should have been PDF slides provided for all the lectures. Secondly and more importantly, there is too much rote learning and just definitions in this course. I know what Cloud Computing is on a very very high level but I still have no idea where to go from here. There should have been a hands-on practical project starting from week 1 with a firm with classic IT infrastructure and what problems it is facing and how Cloud Computing technology can help it solve those problems. That is much needed for this course to assist students in learning the concepts rather than just memorising some definitions.

The robotic woman talking is very hard to follow. The language used seems unnecessarily complex, and is delivered so quickly that is obvious she is either reading from a script or is a computer. The videos with actual humans explaining things were really totally different (in a good way); clear, simple, and concise language. Those clips/videos were much more education compared to the other ones. In those videos I felt like I was actually learning and understanding the concepts and terms as opposed to the robot woman spewing out all sorts of words and sentances without really explaining things in a good way. It is marketed as good for beginners, but there were many terms related to cloud computing that were not explained that I needed to look up on my own. Would be helpful to remember that not all of these cloud computing terms are common for non-techies :)

Thank you for giving me the chance to provide feedback.

I enrolled in the IBM Full Stack Developer Professional Certificate. I am completely new to the IT industry, and have no knowledge in IT. The course Introduction to Cloud Computing actually requires prior fundamental IT knowledge. To be specific, without prior understanding of hardware and operating systems, and basic understanding of software, programming and databases, one will not be able to understand the concepts taught in this course.

Only after completing this course, I realised that I should have done the IBM Information Technology (IT) and Cloud Fundamentals Specialization first. May I kindly suggest that this specialisation is being made a pre-requisite for enrollment into the IBM Full Stack Developer Professional Certificate.

Thank you very much for your time.

After having followed another Course on Coursera, rating that one with 5*, I'm sorry to not be able to give this one more than 3*. It is a dry course - I watched it on double speed and it still felt as some video from the 80s (minus the modern graphics). The instructor who is listed - can't remember seeing his face once. The other instructors, where there, ranged from meh to good.

I would also not say this is a beginner course. People with limited computer knowledge would have a hard time just picking this up - they'd need to do lots of researching on the side.

The assignment at the end is disproportionately easy compared to the rest of the course.

Overall: Yes, I did get bombarded with a lot of info. But will I retain it? Not sure.

The course itself is very informative and quite useful for everybody working in IT. However there were some drawbacks. First of all, I was really annoyed by continious errors and problems of coursera service. First I couldn't take that course and pay, then there was a problem with completing the last assignment. It took too much time to resolve all these technical issues. But the filling of that course is powerful and at the end I was able to resolve all the errors with help of support.

The robot narration and plain presentation slides make it harder for the studies to be engaging. Also, at times it was hard to grasp what the main takeaways were; there were useful summary pages, but the quizzes would ask specific questions that pertain to details of a situation. However, I did appreciate the insights from real professionals in the field. All in all, I would prefer more visualizations, more questions on the key takeaways, and an instructor to present the course.

I have some experience in cloud computing prior to this, and I'm happy to say I learned a significant amount from this course. However, it didn't strike me as information that was very useful. The basics were covered, but only really definitions of those basics, without much hands on work. It was a course that I'd tell business leaders to take if they were thinking about moving to the cloud, but if you want to become a cloud engineer, I'm not sure that this is worth your time.

The class gives a nice introduction to cloud computing and very easy to understand. The Final Assignment's method and criteria for grading is kind of stupid. It requires the help of other students peer-reviewing and most are not serious at reviewing and tend to give really bad grades for correct work or really good grades for mediocer work. If there was some sort of actual review/grading system or atleast questions that don't require "peer review" would've been better.

The course was very detailed but the Cloud account making should not be made into a graded assignment, especially because signing up into IBM Cloud, even for free/trail version is just not user friendly. I tried with three different emails. And even after that I could not create the "free plan" stuffs. I could see others struggle with that too, because it's a peer graded one. Almost the whole discussion is also filled with complains of failed attempts.

Pros This is a very informative and fresh course. It's easy to navigate and has a consistent format. Cons The narration volume of videos was too low and inconsistent. The Cloud IDE lab was slow, buggy, and only worked in Firefox. One of the graded assessments had a duplicate question. One of the wrong answer explanations on a quiz was incorrect. All courses should work well with the Edge as it's the most advanced AI-powered browser.

The course said that it is for people with no background knowledge on the subject but continuously used language that was not taught. I learned a lot, but the pain of listening to the same background music over and over again and working through the dense lectures with difficult language probably could have been avoided while accomplishing the same level of knowledge of transfer or better.

The course covers all the knowledge required but the teaching style is very off putting. Having a robot voice basically run a PPT is not very engaging or helpful. The sections where a real human is teaching is way more effective and helped me understand the information better. If I were to just listen to a robot run through a PPT, I could rather just read through a textbook.

Orienting this course at the beginning of the entire program is a bit overwhelming as the course mostly deals with theories about clouds and how they function, standing from the vantage point of a complete beginner who is just mere interested in code, I would not be able to handle a profuse set of theories about something I have never gotten my hands on.

This 1'st course of 12 was pretty useful in understanding some of the basics of cloud computing but I will say that a lot of the terminology was not as explained humanly as there was a robot voice speaking most of the time and while that is ok I was confused with some of the video topics which made me have to go onto google to learn somethings.

While the course gives you a good understanding of the basics of cloud computing, it sometimes feels a little hacked together with videos intended for other platforms being recycled for the course; the narration voice reading the lectures sounds almost robotic; and the quizzes are rather poorly designed.

Great information was introduced by this course, but most of the videos were so fast and not interactive like someone opened the text reader and recorded the session. I learned a lot of new concepts about cloud computing and cloud security principles.

Good for learning some of the terminology cloud computing. It could use more application-style problems to solidify concepts. I felt like I was just regurgitating definitions during the quizzes, but I suppose that's ok for an intro course.

Felt rushed and like some kind of advertisment for IBM - the production value of the videos was pretty poor too. Still was able to learn some stuff but that course is far from a 5* or 4* course, at least for my standards.

The course is a great stuff for beginners however, practical part of it needs to be added by at least 50% to ensure students get to know in depth cloud operation practically as in theoretically.

Good overview of cloud computing, but didn't get too down into the details. The final assignment for the course was a lot of following directions without really explaining the why behind them.

Most of the videos sound too robotized, which make them less engaging than other IBM courses.

And examples are too much focused on IBM and closer to marketing videos than tech examples.

Not really relevant for imo also I doubt the accuracy of some questions (e.g. Giving the name of one of the largest cloud computing providers and then listing both AWS and Oracle)

I feel this course could have been filled more with info. at the end of the course I felt like I had an idea about cloud services but didnt know what to do with that info