Learner Reviews & Feedback for IT Security: Defense against the digital dark arts by Google

one of the most poor made courses I have ever had the displeasure of paying for. this course is BAD. and my standards for a good online course are pretty low. some of the various sins this course has to answer for are: 1. giving a definition for hardware standard, then linking to "an external reading if you want to learn more" and the FIRST line of that external reading directly conflicts with what the instructor just said.

2. Those "supplemental readings?" yeah 99% of those are links to wikipedias definition of the given subject. hope you weren't actually trying to learn or something.

3. A wonderful collection of the most aggravatingly non-specific multiple choice quiz questions, in which any of the given answers are true, but they're looking for a specific solution for a nonspecific problem so good luck figuring that out.

4. To compliment the non-specific quiz's they offer a fine selection of non-specific directions to writing assignments. only AFTER you submit your project are you able to find out what they are actually looking for. the most extreme example of this is in the final project directions, which one of my colleagues aptly described as "cryptic"

5. Do you like technical failures? cause they do! smash your face in frustration as the labs fail to grant write permissions to the hardrive you are supposed to be working on, your interactive tests gets garbled all over the screen, (and don't tell me that's a user error, I tried that test on 3 different OS's across 2 different machines) or random "Analyzing Background" messages flicker on and off the instructors face.

But its no big deal, there's always time for a couple political propaganda videos or google product promotion

Tldr: everything I hate about google, condensed into one place.

Very difficult course. The last project/assignment took the longest to complete, but the sens of accomplishment that you feel upon finishing is worth it.

While this course has been extremely informative and the instructor is great at explaining the information, I feel like all the courses in this program could implement more screen examples of what will be done in a day to day IT support role. Telling me only helps so much, showing me what you're talking about while this is going would be more helpful. This has, however, encouraged me to look up everything in forums and on youtube.

Interesting course. I loved covering security policies and digital threats. However, the virtual machines in this course wouldn't give me a grade after numerous, perfect completions. It was extremely upsetting to know that I literally did everything else perfectly, but can't get my grade in two labs. This means that I have to wait an undisclosed amount of time before I can get my certification. I have done everything else.

These were pretty cool courses that offer a lot of knowledge but the part where that talk about getting you information out to companies to help you start your career is fully true. They send you a survey that you select the companies you would like to share you information with out of they're selection, and that's it. There is no other follow up or anything as far as I've seen but I've been done with the program for workin on four months no with no other leads to helping me start my career. So it's great maybe to help boost a career you're already in but DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE if you are using it to help START a career. Hope this helps some people out like me looking for a way into the industry.

A lot of information. Pay attention. Push forward. You'll get it done.

Very tough course with a lot of information on creating the best security possible for an individual computer, or an enterprise. The peer reviewed assignment will make you re-evaluate everything you learned and force you to provide ample detail for each area you are required to supply an answer for. No beginners or intermediate learners will pass the peer review the first time; it is difficult, but because of that I know more than I did after submitting my first peer review! Kudos!!

This one was tough, but worth it. The peer review project is best worked on as you go through the course.

It's a good course. They definitely teach you all ground basic concepts. However I WISH they would have involved classes on how to properly set up a router, build a server from scratch, you know things like that. WOULD HAVE BEEN AWESOME!

Overall is a good course if you have no knowledge at all and I would definitely recommend it.

I learned so much more from this course. More than 2 years of courses at a college. Thank you to those who worked on putting this course together.

Good content.

The best thing ever! This course has increased my confidence in real world and up-to-the-second skills for job readiness

This is a very good course for someone who wants to have a good background in IT support and for someone who wants to have a refresher in IT.

This was the most interesting course in the section. If you put in a lot of work into the projects you will learn a lot from them.

Course 1 and 5 are probably my favorite of the courses because i feel i learned a lot in these two the most, all are great i just really wanted to learn more about security which was course 5

Many technical issues regarding labs and no explanations or feedback for important and critical issues.

The course contents are really good but I didn't feel that the final assignment fit the contents .

This course is overloaded by formal theory. Attempts to explain complex concepts in simple language are weak. Practice is absolutely not enough. Also, final assignment is confusing: while it declares to create some description of real working system, it's goal is "just write down every technical term you heard".

It's a formal course, not about learning, just memorizing some tech terms.

The course was very information and easy to follow I am not fond of the peer reviewed assignment, because I am done with this course, but I have to wait until someone grades my final peer assignment to be done with the complete course. I had to resubmit my final peer assignment three times, because my peers were not giving me any credit for recommendations that I clearly wrote. I appreciated the criticism, but I strongly believe that it is unfair to give someone no credit for something they they did do. In addition, there is no detailed rubric given prior to completing the final peer graded assignment.

The first week of the course was quite good. However, starting with Week 2, the explanations became quite vague, and too technical.

If the information provided is vague, it should be about non-technical concepts. If the information is technical, it should be explained in detail and broken down to the learner. I expected great things going into this course, since it's being taught by Google.

I saw that the course didn't necessarily require prior knowledge from the previous 4 courses, but it would help if I had a background in IT. I cannot understand many concepts in this course even though I'm an IT graduate (and a good one). I expect math, visuals and demonstrations to be part of my course material when I'm enrolled in such a technical course. I didn't get enough of any of those.

The instructor is nice, knowledgeable, and friendly, and I don't know if I can solely blame him for this, but I didn't have enough supplementary info provided to me about the things I was learning. The links in our reading assignments were sometimes too technical and required additional research to understand. Maybe I'm too unintelligent for this course, I don't know, but I can't complete this course and claim to be someone who understands IT security. I wish you good luck in improving this course.

I learned a lot, thanks Google.

A course that everyone in the digital world needs to know it.

Very challenging and rich content training. Than you so much

Great course very informational.

Incredible set of knowledge, well explained from easy to really hard, learned more organization to get through the last course.