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TLDR: A good course full of valuable information delivered in an archaic and occasionally inaccessible way. I have mixed feelings about this course. On the one hand, it provides a very comprehensive overview of how networks operate and I have a much better understanding of the topic than before I started, which means that I have achieved my learning goals. It’s more than just a surface-level introduction, with a lot of focus on the protocols and technologies that work together to make networks possible. On the other hand, there’s a lot that I don’t like about the course delivery. It falls into the classic trap of thinking that an online course needs to consist only of one guy talking at a camera for hours, supported by text-wall infodumps presented as ‘supplemental reading’. The section on wireless networking was, frankly, a nightmare in this regard. Little or no effort is made to leverage the fact that this is an online course, not a course delivered in a classroom; there are few practical exercises, and no reappearance of the interactive learning environments from ‘technical support fundamentals’. Such practicals as there are (I can only remember one - wifi channel selection- but there may have been more) don’t seem to add any real value to learning the concepts. You’d recognize this class style if you’d just sat through a lecture from Socrates 2000 or whatever years ago. The course quickly becomes an exercise not in understanding and applying the material, but in remembering seemingly countless acronyms, standards, and data points that, practically, you can just look up if you need it. The weighting of information is also not always clear; some seemingly minor points that take a couple of seconds in a video appear in the end of unit exam, to much frustration. I gave up trying to score highly in the exams and just shot for a passing grade in the last two units because goodness me, if I need that level of granular detail, I can just google it. In summary, yes it is a useful course, yes there is a lot of good info here, but it could be so much better if the power of computing was used to add more practicality and more opportunities to actually apply the information you learn. Network simulation tools exist in the open source space, so there’s no reason such simulators could not be incorporated here. The archaic design and delivery of the course is likely to be the biggest challenge you will face in completing it, but completing it is valuable for the network novice.

For context: this was not the first time I have been exposed to 75% of the information in this course. It was meant as a refresher, and to fill in gaps in my knowledge. It did succeed at this: I now understand more than I did before.

That being said: there are some issues with this course. First and foremost, there was occasional inaccurate information. The particular example that I recall was MAC spoofing being the correct answer to the question "What is a common way to improve WiFi security?" (I am paraphrasing, something to that effect). As I put it in my feedback, this does not prevent anyone with greater than 15 brain cells from getting on your WiFi. It is trivially easy to bypass, and anyone capable of using Google could figure out how to do it in less than 10 minutes.

Luckily, this sort misinformation is relatively rare. I ran into it 3-4 times throughout this course, but it is by no means a systemic issue. There were some other minor issues with low level networking terms that could confuse someone with experience who was not merely parroting the answers from the previous videos, but on the whole this was not a persistent issue.

In a previous version of this review, I made some negative comments about the lack of labs. This was because I did not have a basis for comparison with the rest of the course. Because I have now been exposed to the some of the other modules, I have learned to lower my standards. By those standards, this course is actually pretty good, and it is easily the best one in this series. I still have minor gripes, but nothing compared to the issues I have with some of the later courses.