The course did a good job of building on the material. I was following along on a Linux machine and there are certain things Cindy would do off screen that i was not able to follow and had to do online research. For example, when it comes to mounting the USB drive, she creates a mount point off screen. Luckily I am good at googling things. I don't mind doing that but may hurt those who to do not come from a computer background or have had minimal exposure to computers up to the point of taking the course. I would suggest giving students access to virtual instance of Linux as we do for the assessments. This will be good for those who do not have the resources or the financial wherewithal to obtain them. I would also suggest maybe taking 2 minutes for a refresh on installing and uninstalling during this course as it was months ago we went through the first course.

For the Overall Program

I would suggest adding more assessment similar to the graded assessments during the modules. Not everyone will use Linux everyday and by the time they get to the final assessment, they will have forgotten. Nothing is more effective at retention than repetition.

There are definitely some out of date lab instructions within this course. One being was week 4 and week 6. Week 6 had an issue where you couldn't straight forward find the file that needed its permissions to be changed. While week 4 the instructions were not so clear about what drive you needed to format and how exactly you find out what megabytes you need to figure out the partition needs to create a drive with 1 gigabyte or 9 gigabyte. However after some digging I did find out the amount which was about 2000 something, but I guess in my head it didn't made sense as i thought 1024 megabytes would equate to a gigabyte. So I had to fiddle around a bit. Ultimately the course was educational and fun, but could need some tweaking with some of the exercises. I also saw that a lot of people's account were getting temporarily banned because they repeated exercise too much because they couldn't complete it in the allocated time. If there were instructions for people to gain access to again to qwiklabs and make it more.

Pros: I gained a lot of information about various operating system subjects such as using windows powershell, linux commands, and advanced file management. I have a greater understanding how operating systems perform tasks. I know how to read system logs, format hard drives and even more. Discussion prompts are fun. One is definitely going to learn something new from taking the course.

Cons: While I did enjoy the course the instructors should have of a professional appearance. The last two labs of week of 6 don't have clear instructions so I recommend using the forums for help if needed. Also I don't agree with some of career advice which is basically you don't need a degree to work in tech just many many many years of specialized experience, a lucky opportunity and a mentor. That sounds like those who are privileged socially are going to land the best tech support jobs.

Overall: I'm glad I took the course. My technical skills have increased which will help me grow as tech writer.

Decent course, however, Google, or whomever built the curriculum, really needs to go back through and update the info. Come on you guys, you tell us and we all know how FAST technology changes! We have to adapt as Tech Sprt Specs, so how about leading by example and keeping this course up to cutting edge info, e.g. Powershell commands that are obsolete, applications that are gone, systems that have been replaced, etc.

I am 52 years old. I have 30 years in a security profession that was stripped out from under me in a month. I am having to adapt, learn, train, improvise, and seek the latest like no other time in my life. I, and millions of others, LIVED the computer/information age. In my short existance I have seen Beta machines, 8-track, and bell-bottom jeans give way to everything we take for granted today, i.e. The cloud, IoT, iOS, Zoom, FaceTime, Duo, SaaS, Machine Learning, AI, and soon Mars, for pete's sake. Keep this Google Certification FRESH and RELAVENT....Please!

The labs were very difficult. However, it forced me to work on my troubleshooting skills using Event Viewer and Logs. Thank you for being mean. I was mad at first. But sometimes you have to push people in order to get them to progress. Because of the level of CLI involved, I think there should have been more hands on throughout the weekly lessons. And also when you do the labs it took 10-15 minutes for the programs to load up and that took away from the actual lab time. There wasn't enough time for a person to finish the labs. You had to take them over and over to get thru them. That was exhausting and annoying. Perhaps for other people, there should be 1.5 hours of time. This will allow time for the 'gathering of information' time and the complete hour to be used for the lab. That's the only reason I gave this course 4 stars instead of 5. All in all, it was a good course. Thank YOU!!!!! ^__^

I think the course was great. I could sit all day and soak up the info, however, I do feel like there should be more labs or some sort of role play interactive game for more hands on learning. Even taking real IT recorded phone calls from customers and turning them into some sort of additional training program for a more hands on approach. Personally, I learn better from actually doing the work than just reading and watching videos. One more note; on the last Linux lab, it is asking for us to refer to week 3 and "update an out of date software"....but I could not find anywhere in this course about updating software. Come to find out that installing the software was the answer, so that was very confusing and time consuming. Are installing and updating the same thing??? i don't think so, but please correct me if I am wrong.

I was going to give this a 3 out of 5 originally but It did have a lot new information that an IT support will need at some point. I did however feel the person presenting the course sounded robotic at times, it felt like she was just following along the prompt to much therefore made the course boring. Since I was new the command lines, PowerShell and Linux I did feel lost many times. I would like to see more real world examples. I also did not like seeing the same person for 99% of the course, which made this a little lame. It could use a mix of people more often. Again it's going to be rare to apply all this new information. I know I will forget how to some of these commands sense they are not used daily. I need to find a way to remember this stuff in the future, good thing I took a lot of notes.

The course was globally good: the videos were always interesting and the topic was well explained. There was a lot to learn/remember (the commands in both Linux and Windows) so I recommend writing it down! The only thing that doesn't give this course a five out of five ratings is the labs... The time for the last labs was too short and the instructions were not very clear. I know that it was done that way so the learner can work autonomously but I was permanently not sure of what I was doing or why I was obtaining points. It misses, for example, something that shows the learners' progress. I saw that a lot of other learners thought the same thing as me so I think that it needs some improvement in this part. Overall, it was a good course and I recommend to take part in this course :)

This Course like the others was very informative and comprehensive. Over all I think these courses are great. There are a couple of things that could be improved.

#1) Qwiklabs has a lot of bugs during the session and they can be very frustrating to work to resolve while completing the Labs.

#2) The search index for course content seems to struggle with some words or word combos in the lessons. Searches often turn up empty. Especially when searching for command key words or full code expressions.

#3) It would be really great if at the completion of each week's lesson, or after receiving the certificate for each individual Course, that a Complete Table of the Coding / Programming Commands used in each week, was unlocked as a study tool, and to maintain that knowledge.

Good information, but please for crying out loud proofread the text Fix The Typos!! There are many places where commands given in the video narration are missing/incomplete in the text. Syntax matters in this case and for a complete beginner these inconsistency's can cause lots of unneeded confusion. It's obvious a speech-to-text converter was used because it does not interpret commands correctly, nor can it help if the instructor's voice level drops (or she stops talking completely...grrr) while she's typing commands. I realize that students are supposed to watch the videos, but the text needs to be accurate as well. One star off for this sloppiness, especially coming from someone like Google. I would have expected better.

I want to give this 5 stars so much but I feel like it fell short on a few things. Firstly the linux labs with there pkk files were not well introduced so the first lab was a struggle to get into. Also all the other linux labs seemed to have there own quarks such as having to deviate from the parameters laid out. Which if done on purpose brilliant! If not then just a head ache. But the final labs were amazing and just made me wish all the labs had been like that. Because those were the best simulation of on the job work. The instructor was lovely. And the course material was great. Just need a little polish on the labs and an increase in difficulty and it would be exquisite.

Qwiklab assignments are quite slow to recognize actions taken in the VMs (a couple of minutes), which is understandable. Sometimes, however, I would get 50/50 on a lab and then end the lab. I go back and it doesn't show up as completed (or even attempted). Wait a couple of days for the system to work. Nope still not there. Support was able to help quickly and resolve the problem after providing screenshots of the completed lab, but one lab I had to redo because I forgot to take a screenshot at the end of it. I have no idea where the grade gets lost between the Google Cloud Platform/Qwiklabs and the main Coursera system but it happened multiple times for me. :/

Full of valuable information! But could have been even better. I really liked the last lab- it encouraged the exploration of new methods and creative solutions, but there was always the option to go back in the course to reference material as a last resort. I feel like there should have been more of these labs. Perhaps shorter ones allow users to really play around with new commands and refresh older ones that are very often used alongside the new one(s).

Some real-life scenarios, maybe multiple-choice, could be implemented, too. These methods were used in another certification program I've been in (CareerStep, Medical Coding & Billing).

This was good. I enjoyed course #2 much more than the other two so far. Many of the references that are given as "Supplemental Reading" in this course are quite boring considering the vast amount of stuff one could learn. Many topics in those sections are simply useless: I don't care about flags and options available for a command, that's what the built-in help command is for. Otherwise, you can quickly Google your way around. You won't be a power user after taking this course, but some notions are very useful and well presented, such as users and groups permissions, process management and troubleshooting with the help of system logs.

Parecerá extraño lo que diré pero ha sido el tema que más me ha gustado y disfruté mis logros; pero a la vez, me ha hecho sentir frustración, impotencia, y en ocasiones, ganas de dejarlo. Me sentía como una pelota de tennis donde Venus Linux y Serena Windows me agarraban a raquetazos tirándome de un lugar a otro o Messy Linux y Ronaldo Windows me daban a patadas y me mandaban de un campo a otro. Era como si estuviera haciendo dos cursos en uno. Pero uds. y los del Qwiklab no dejaban que me diera por vencida. Así que, GRACIAS A UDS. lo terminé.

Realmente preferiría ambos temas impartidos aparte con muchos Lab.

Excelente material, lo único que se batalla es en las pruebas pues en mi caso el teclado en Windows no encontraba caracteres que se usan en el curso, use teclado en pantalla, y o buscar comandos en el navegador y pegarlos y la ultima practica en Linux esta mal optimizado el área de trabajo una quinta parte de lado izquierdo contra otras 4 partes derecho de la información ojala revisen esos detalles habrá personas que batallaran mucho mas que yo; Nota yo uso opera y la experiencia en las otras practicas si fue buena, pero como los últimos laboratorios me mostraban fallas cambie a Chrome y fue peor saludos

Excellent material. Excellent content. The only reason I did not give this 5 stars was due to QwikLabs which are an astronomical waste of time. I finally found the problem. I did not need a workaround; the chat people are very friendly and entirely not helpful. Sadly, the problem is a simple one and lies directly with QwikLab and connecting to the Secure Shell. No one at Coursera and no one at QwikLab seems to care. The student is left on their own to try to figure it out on their own. After an astronomical 40 hours, I realized QwikLab's error. Otherwise I would give the course 5 stars.

I learned a bunch of new material in this course! I am especially happy with the labs at the end. Finally, a challenging lab. I actually had to use my head and my notes. I find the walk through labs interesting and helpful, but not nearly as much as having to try and figure things out based on what I was taught. My only gripes are the instruction seems to breeze past or gloss over certain details while going through things and there is an awful lot of "suggested reading" of things that probably should be covered. I hope to see more on those things, as promised in the videos, in the next courses.

This course is great and you will learn a lot of things. The course is 5/5 on material. However, several portions of the graded tests from the middle onward are broken in ways that require you to fix it yourself. This means if you're not mildly familiar with untaught troubleshooting on your own, that you will end up stuck somewhere here and have no way of understanding why. I think this is unfair for the newbies, and for the extra time it takes and trouble it makes for everyone else. But it is rewarding overall nonetheless even if you don't get extra credit for working around those problems.

Much of this course I already knew, though I did learn a few new tricks along the way. However the final was a bit aggravating, as it expects you to do everything in perfect order without any instructions or actual end goals, the only way to find out your actual goals, is to revert to previous labs for a turn by turn instruction and completion, which is time consuming and stressful. If they simply included/refreshed us on what specific goals were needed (i.e. delete the corrupt file, grant write access to all users for super_secret_file) it would be tremendously helpful.

Check those last two labs(Windows and Linux Logs) for grading errors. I completed all of the assigned tasks, but only received a score of 80% for each lab. I completed both of the final labs a second time, and still only received an 80% score. All of the tasks to be completed in these labs are simple, and I know that I completed everything correctly, as I've been an IT Support Manager for 5 years now, and a Support Specialist for 10 years prior, and have performed all of the tasks in these labs about 300 times. Something is wrong with the Qwiklab grading system...

I had tremendous technical difficulties with this course's labs, which were FINALLY overcome. But it's been immensely enjoyable attaining these new skills and knowledge about operating systems. It's been very hard work but alot of fun and tutor Cindy puts this complex material across so amazingly well. I did feel so much was crammed into so short a space but it's very hard to put all this stuff together for newbies. The pace has to quicken at some point and this, half way through the scholarship has to be the point where it happens. Thanks everyone :)

I got 120 pages of notes after the first three courses in this google IT certificate thus far. I really liked the part where they mention full primary hard drives and their effects on the laptop. I have seen that before. Someone was trying to print and nothing came out. An IT guy mentioned that , so I looked and noticed the customer had a 99% full disk. It was a known problem that the customer did nothing about. He wouldn't listen to IT's advice and they have a standard laptop that everyone gets, so they couldn't do anything special for him.

I enjoyed the class and found that it covered a ton of information (thank the gods for OneNote). My only issue is that is seemed like Linux was often sort of tacked on to the program. We would spend 7 minutes of more going over how to do something in Windows and then Linux would barely get 2.

Now, I realize that some of this is because WIN is so common out there and because Linux can simply be easier to use once you understand some commands, but, if I wanted to learn Linux by studying web sites and trying to work it out, I would have done that.

I wish more examples (even if a quick in passing example) as to how some of this stuff will be used, or is important. Having never worked with a virtual machine I still don't know why that would necessarily come in handy when I think about my experience in Corporate America. Overall a lot of really good information but I wish more of the Linux labs were like the last one. I struggle the most with CLI and Bash. Having the chance to use my brain and being guided a bit better to figuring out some of these commands would have been nice.