best

good

good

Three big points with regard to the Networking course.

1. Victor Escobedo, the instructor, is great. He's a huge step-up from the first course (Tech Support Fundamentals) and its carousel of people constantly shuffling in-and-out, and he's ahead of the instructors you're given in the later courses, too. He might present as being a little corny and -- at times -- he's a little robotic reading off of the teleprompter but he's got a great way of speaking to help you follow his line of thoughts. Others don't seem like they actually... care about your success? I know it's weird to think that a dude reading off a teleprompter could care, but it's kind of a "you have to experience it to get what I mean".

2. This course and the curriculum are an absolutely silly jump in how difficult the material can be to parse and make sense of. If you breezed through Course 1, this one might stop you dead in your tracks when it tries to teach you something like Subnetting (which was the biggest pain point for me, personally). There are also points where the curriculum doesn't really efficiently explain a point, which is kind of a good thing, because it encourages you to seek out other resources. A lot of what I began learning in this course, I'd finish learning on YouTube or in some documentation on Wikipedia.

3. For some reason, this course is going to tell you the TCP/IP 5-layer model is the standard. It's going to speak in terms of the TCP/IP 5-layer model a lot. You need to learn the OSI model instead. No one uses TCP/IP, and the Supplemental Reading they offer actually tells you that it's being phased out in favor of the OSI.

For me, I had to use a lot of outside resources to help me understand this and a lot of the time, there aren't practical examples you can follow to better grasp what it is a lot of these things are. As in, you'll learn *how* to determine how many subnets any given IPv4 address may have, but you'll never actually open a program on your computer and work with subnets hands-on. Whereas in course 3 (Operating Systems and you) you're constantly encouraged to follow along with the instructor's work.

All in all, I think this is an essential course for everyone. It's important to understand how all this network stuff works in an increasingly digital age where we're sending info through the air. Heavily recommend.

The course itself is excellent. I'm impressed by how much information can be easily explained in a compact format. It truly is a 5 star course.

That said, the tech support being offered is Amazon level incompetence, and Coursera should be embarrassed. The IPv6 compression exam at the end of this course has a serious technical bug. I reached out to Coursera's technical support team, two members of which -- Evelyn and Jet, specifically -- ignored what I wrote, declared the problem to be my fault, and gave me instructons on how to complete the exam because they clearly thought I was a moron. The problem was an imposed character limitation of 20 characters in the answer space due to copy/paste inexplicably adding extra invisible characters in the answer space. The other workaround to ensure a correct answer requires entering something screwball that should not have worked whenever a correct answer was checked as wrong. I did my research to get past that and solved it in under 24 hours, whereas your support team have been sitting on this for at least 6 months, as reported in the forums Evelyn and Jet so "helpfully" suggested I check. After being on the receiving end of a shining example of how not to offer IT support according to your own certification course, I'll let your crack team figure it out on their own. Rest assured, I won't bother to reach out to them again.

Exposure to new vocabulary, etc. is excellent. In the fog of learning I picked up much terrific minutiae. Yet somehow with the minutiae I need a better understanding of the purpose of ip addressing, network stack model work, reside and interplay. Better illustration of the handoff between layers and when they handoff and why. Possibly my reviewing the material will prove to strengthen my grasp of this and other but I'll probably have to go to other resources. Through the networking I have felt as though I was lacking some fundamental understanding even as I was learning. I do not feel confident. Thinking about what I've learned is a blur. I guess future repetition and re-reading will help. Hopefully, the completion of the certificate will be valued by employers.

If you got here from Course 1, just know this course does not pull punches at all. There is going to be several technical jargon terms thrown at you every video, and you're expected to remember them. I recommend buying a college-ruled notebook and pen, because you are going to have to write a lot down to keep up and remember everything. This is the reason I give the course 4 stars, by trying to minimize the length of the videos, there isn't quite the amount of time a typical student would need to memorize all this material.

I think the course videos were good, but the quizzes at the end of the model could be little bit more engaging as most of the questions were basic ones.

i wish it would be much more practical and hands on systems and real scenarios

It would've been nice if the course provided more exmaples of how all the concepts of networking work in real life. It was pretty hard for me to piece all the inforamtion together, and understand how everything works eventually.

this course was not well explained . special week 2 and week 3 . the video could be more clear and simplified . there was a lot of error . week 5 and 6 was good . networking map could be explained better

having an issue with week 6 that has not been resolved by coursera. The issue has been there in one of the last excersices without a resolution. I am dissapointed at the potential for this certificate

Good

This was a really hard course and I genuinely hope you guys go back and rework it some day.

What made it so hard was the density of the material, the breakneck pacing this dense material was whipped through, and the lack of support for someone new to the information like myself to keep up. I struggled so hard I almost quit the course, but came back after taking about a month off.

Overall I think my biggest suggestion to improve the accessibility of the information - ESPECIALLY for this Networking section - is to do more with the transcript. Take it from a rough and often inaccurate transcript of the audio to a proper text box. Have an easy way to access definitions for terms being thrown around because again, the information is so dense and and there is so much of it and sometimes a word will be referenced again long after it was first presented and I have no idea where in my notes that definition will be and I don't want to take the time to hunt around through my documents only to be hit shortly after with another term I don't remember. Have a key at the bottom with the definitions of terms used. Or if you want to get really fancy and awesome make it so when you hover over a word in the text section and a little definition box will pop up for you.

My other big suggestion particularly for this section is to really idiot proof your explanations and examples. A lot of the information felt utterly inaccessible as someone totally new to this field. Prime example is that section about, like, reformatting/shortening IP addresses or something. I can't tell you because I didn't learn a thing. Y'all gave an explanation and I watched through the video 3 times trying to understand. But you guys jumped around between steps between two examples and I couldn't follow the process start to finish. You need to break shit down, step by step, go through a full example start to finish and THEN go onto another example step by step.

This is not a great course. i have just finished this course and let me tell you, this course is not very beginner friendly despite what the requirement part says. i cant give this course a one star as it does give some information, just not in a manner a beginner would expect. words, acronyms and numbers are being thrown around and i understand nothing. How are these things used in the field? as in HOW are they used? what can i do to use them? how do i troubleshoot? what software do i use? what hardware will i use? what is going on? I don't see the end goal of taking this particular course. there is a lot of talking but no showing. only right at the end do we get to see some stuff in the form of coding. it is also a bad course since we pay for this course and yet most of the things dont make sense to anyone who is not already in this field. if you are charging money for this, then i should be able to understand at least the basic concept from you and then go to other sources to expand my knowledge on what this course shows me. it shouldn't be the other way around where i don't understand majority of what you explain and that to even understand the basic concepts i have to go to other sources. unfortunately, you need to do this course in addition to the others to finish the program, so you have to muscle through it but honestly, it's a huge disappointment. only ones this course will help are those who are already in the field and/or need a refresher.

Needs massive improvement. I did not enjoy this module. It was overly complicated than it should be without Cousera coach I would not have been able to understand certain topics. 1. Video needs more visual aid along some key interest in diagrams highlighted so we will actually know what the presenter is referring to. 2. Some of the videos are littered with annotations because of some minor mistakes the presenter had made which makes the video disrupting. 3. Slow down! The presenter is rushing present the content 90% of the time. This is not a Tiktok or YT shorts video

The guy talking in this course feels like he is not getting to his speaking points very well making it hard to learn what is needed and expected

It was good till I got to the Ipv6 compression quiz/exam and it glitched out not giving me the correct grade after I got all 10 correct.

Module 6 final exam defaults to a 0 percent after successful completion. The bug is detrimental to all progress in the course.

Way too many errors in the videos. An added text saying "whoops!" In every video isn't acceptable.

you should give it for free

I attempted through both the course forums and contacting Coursera tech support to rectify a problem with a question in the graded quiz portion of the week 4 content. Both methods failed for various reasons.

There is a question in the week 4 content that either is incorrectly worded, or does not have the correct answer as an option. This is not to say that there is not an answer that is coded as correct. This is to say that even if there is a coded correct answer, that answer is wrong, because all of the available answers are wrong.

The question is what kind of packet is sent when a client sends a DNS request. The answer is UDP. The options available include one packet type, TCP, and 3 answers listing various flags for TCP that are used during the three way handshake.

While it is true that if the DNS server responds with a UDP packet indicating that the DNS response is too long, then the client will establish a TCP connection, which would involve a TCP packet, and the first packet would include a SYN flag. None of that answers the question asked.

I've given this review 1 star in the hopes that someone somewhere will take note and actually fix this problem. Tech support at Coursera repeatedly informed me that they were "not content experts" and the mentor who responded on the forums either failed to comprehend my issue, or just didn't know what they were talking about.

The course is actually very good outside of this single error, and I hope if you're reading this review trying to decide whether to take the course that you choose to do so.

Absolutely terrible. The first course was very good at giving a beginner a start in computing. Computer history, computer basic language and binary. How to build a basic computer. Awesome. This guy here in this course just talked at me for weeks. No real history of the internet. No real basics. Tell me stories. Teach me like I am in 6th grade then add the technical side of things. Tell me how my email gets to my friend in Dubai in the simplest terms possible and then add the very technical layers, bits, bytes and specs on top of and into that basic story. Tell me the simple story of how a YouTube video gets to me. THEN add the technical aspects building one network layer and one data packet at a time for the basics of how the internet works and how a Youtube video gets to me. Then I would have a solid foundations. Give me interactive diagrams explaining the network and network packages that I can play with. Give me diagrams that I can DOWNLOAD and save so that I can have a reference point later at any time in my learning OR career. I did learn some things but I still don't even understand how eithernet or subnets work. Very disappointing. Almost a waste of my time because now I will have to go somewhere else to actully learn netorking so I have a solid grasp of it. Seriously how am I supposed to go from no knowledge to capable of helping other people with no knowledge when this guy JUST TALKED AT ME for weeks of my life.

I really did not enjoy this course. It consisted of mostly superfluous information and terms that only the server itself would need to know. The whole time, I was waiting for it to show me a real life, in-the-field demonstration of how this is used to solve actual networking problems, Spoiler alert....it never happened. So now my head is filled with a bunch of techno word salad that I don't even know how to use.

Not to mention that the IPV6 final bugged several times, counting correct answers as incorrect. And it's designed so that if you get one wrong answer, you have to do the WHOLE thing over. One time I managed to get it to correctly mark all of my answers, just to have the "submit" button missing at the bottom. Which meant that I had to do it all AGAIN.

The TLDR is this. Imagine watching hours of videos that read every word in the dictonary to you Then, at the end of each section, you have to take a test that asks you to define every word that start with the letter "A", then "B", then "C", etc.

There is no way someone who has no experience in this field is able to learn and finish this course in the estimated timeline. There were no pictures of the talked about items, nothing to show us what things looked like, we interacted with these topics on the minimum, there wasn't any way for us to associated these topics with anything. There aren't even any kind of recommendations to practice these skills. I struggled so much throughout this whole course and was more so frustrated. I felt so underprepared and as if there was no way this was worth my money. 50$ a month just to have a vague idea about anything taught in this program? I think in these times, money could be better spent than trying to catch up on all the teaching I'm not getting with this course.