I liked the first two courses a lot, The information there was well presented. This instructor jumps around in topics during discussion, fails to post links she says will be available, and provides a lot of incomplete information. I flagged many of the video clips for this. I really think this section of the course should be remade with someone who is more competent as a teacher. I had to do a LOT of independent research to fill in the gaps. Cindy seems to know her stuff really well, but she's a *terrible* instructor and it would be great if this could be cleaned up to be on par with the rest of the course offerings.

Pros- There is a lot of good stuff in between the massive amounts of bleh in this course.

Cons - This course isn't very engaging, and suffers in the lesson the student doesn't have a matching machine. Puts too much pressure on the student during graded assignments, which already take too long to download and some don't even work properly (mostly the Windows ones).

Suggestions - Make more of the course (working) Qwiklabs. The material in this course you don't learn properly if you're not using it yourself. Not all students have either a Windows or a Linux OS, let alone both, and the Labas are there only practice.

Command Line is a special form of torture. And anyone who says that they like it are clearly masochistic. That being said, the course content was fine. I especially like the parts about permissions and killing rogue processes. But I had a TERRIBLE time with the labs. Not because the content being tested was too difficult; but because the scoring of lab activities consistently had problems. There was big latency lags, finicky VM Instances with the Windows RDC, and many times, I had to start a lab over due to incomplete scoring. What a huge waste of time! It made completing each module stressful and unpleasant.

The least stimulating use of your time imagineable. Just hours upon hours of memorizing commands you'll use once and fun facts about technology that'll be obsolete by the time you actually get a job in IT. Don't bother watching the videos, just read the transcripts (assuming they're not riddled with typos, since they often are) since you'll get the same (very little worthwhile) information in 1/20th of the time. This SERIOUSLY needs to get some fat trimmed off, the material can be difficult enough without the course being a massive test of patience.

You better make sure you've got a good memory to get through this course. While the information is basic on operating systems that most people have knowledge of, the quizzes and qwiklab practices are a joke.

You're expected to remember things from weeks ago--assuming that it takes you the full six weeks to complete this course.

the qwiklabs are a pain and the instructions are unclear and a major headache. It took several attempts with tech support to find out what I was doing wrong.

This certificate better lead to some good jobs after all this work.

This course, similar to the previous one in terms of difficulty, as been a big challenge and I had to deal with alot of things that I had no idea that existed. It's not been easy as the way the course is given to us students is not the best way in my opinion because It looks like everything is rushed and it gets kinda boring after a while. The quizzes through qwiklabs well.. I still don't have a positive opinion about them. I had a big fight trying to copy and paste from my windows to the VM... Overall I am not enjoying the course.

I was looking forward to this course and was very disappointed. The structure of the course was very confusing and chaotic. I wasn't sure why we were being taught how to create a folder, this seemed like a very basic "user" task. When the instructor was demonstrating processes in PowerShell or Linux, she sped through the commands so quickly that I would usually have to play the video over several times. This is such an important course in the certificate that I strongly suggest google revisit the content and the instructor.

The course does provide a lot of information, however, the constant short videos (an issue I've had with all of the Google courses I have taken), no command prompt lists at the beginning of the weeks' course--it can be difficult to remember all the prompts for both operating systems. It would be handy to have the lists beforehand for an easy reference guide and to make it easier to follow along with the instructor. Not a terrible course, just some tweaks would make the experience easier to follow.

It was extremely difficult to navigate but the information contained is interesting and informative. The videos just make it super difficult to understand and the transcript and the video has different things - like white background and blue script that are informing us these are important. The initial quiz was difficult was navigate and eventually pass. (some questions are asked in such a strange way, it is difficult to interpret and plus many of the correct ways are marked wrong several times.

I honestly cannot recommend this course due to its reliance on qwiklabs every week. I was left dreading the assessments because qwiklabs would crash, run slow, not save my work, and sometimes just not work at all. I was in contact with the qwiklabs tech support team without and it was just frustrating. The labs should have been fixed before this course was released to students. It costs a lot of money to take this course and the quality of the labs is just not good enough.

The course itself was quite good. The reason I did not give it high marks was because the labs for week 6, were EXTREMELY difficult due to lack of instructions. I spent hours on Youtube looking for help. This course is for people without any experience other than what we are getting in the course itself. I did not find it helpful to have something that caused me so much frustration. A little guidance would be helpful for the labs for week 6.

Honestly, the linux instances were great. The windows RD is trash unfortunately. Eventually i figured out the issue, however. I reported the bug and the workaround, posted to the forum and hopefully it worked for everyone else. I still have two final assignments on week 6 but this course was a slog. I attempted some of the assignment 14 times, zendesk on the qwiklabs side is absolute trash. coursera support was phenomenal however.

The instructor was not a good choice to teach this kind of material, her personality was dull and I found myself not excited by the content because of it. The content itself was REALLY dense for a 6 week deal. I don't feel like 6 weeks is long enough or that there was enough practice work to really make the content stick. The back and forth Linux/Windows was mind boggling and was not an effective way to teach someone.

Major issues with tech support from Quiklabs. Two of these labs could not be completed due to issues with the systems in their VMs. It took them 6 days to respond to an issue I raised, and their response completely ignored the issue I was having. They literally just copied and pasted the instructions for the lab into an email. I almost ran out of time to complete the course before its deadline due to this.

Our instructor WAS MOST DEFINATELY NOT AN INSTRUCGTOR. SHE WAS PULLED OFF AN ASSIGNMENT AND GIVEN THIS AS AN ASSIGNMENT. I can say this because I was an English Teacher for almost 40 years. I can spot someone who knows how to keep the attention of the class and someone who is simply reading off a script. I give our instructor points for trying but most definitely as an Instructor she gets a D-.

I found this course to be the hardest one to slog through. It felt as though you are thrown a lot of information but not enough to actually feel as though you've learned or applied anything. If it is important enough to teach, then make a full lesson of it. I have enjoyed the courses to date, but this one, I feel, needs a complete overhaul. Additionally, the labs often did not function correctly.

Most of this course was just copying and pasting code into powershell. I wish there were more opportunities to practice writing the code for the simple navigation. There was not enough repetition of this process to get familiar with all of the commands, thus making the last lab one of the worst of the entire course.

Lots of good- accurate- but useless information. I have been a Desktop Support Tech since 2002 and have never needed to use Powershell or Command prompts to this level. For small to mid-level companies....this is WAY to much. Your basic front line support help desk guy will never use this information....esp Linux.

The Labs were bad this chapter. Also is it possible to make the video larger when you're taking notes, especially with the both tabs closed. it would easier to see what commands and whatever she's trying to show how to better. It's a hard to take the notes and trying to see what she's doing with the smaller video

ALL LINUX should be presented together rather than zigzagging around.

For this course final on LINUX ~ 1 hour is insufficient.

No way to pause & work accomplished is lost after the hour & it just takes longer ~ I'm sure most students come to the class without much or any LINUX background.

Pretty interesting basics in OS, but assignments was really too easy and not really making us doing the exercices bu ourselves : it was explained step by step what we need to do, but nowhere we had to try to do it by ourseves, except the very last assignment.

The final exam/lab is ridiculous. A lot of guessing for the lack of clear instructions. There's no clarity on what is expected to be accomplished. Otherwise it would deserve a 5 stars. Because the course content is good. But the final Lab has to be changed.

A lot of glitches i experienced using the labs which both made me feel like an insane person and stressed me out more than I needed to. I am using a macbook so I know these things can be less than perfect. Just thought I would at least mention it.

This was difficult course with VM graded exams. Very hard to read at times (too small), I was holding my laptop up to my face to read and or typing. I tried enlarging with no luck... In turn, I was late on my exams through out the course.

Weird combo of tasks. Some way to simple for someone aspiring to become a 1st level sys-admin. Then followed up by insanely complicated tasks that I know (after 30 years in IT, often as a hiring manager), no one entry level will *ever* use!