Coursera Hong Kong University Full Stack Web Development Courses

1

I wanted to review this coursera class because I enrolled in it and wanted others to benefit from my experience. I finished Courses 1 and 2 with mixed feelings and DNF’d course 3 because of a lack of support.

Course 1 has a different instructor than the rest of the series and is a pretty good introduction to HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I took this class before I found FCC and I enjoyed it. I have mixed feelings about using CodePen - it sure makes it simpler to get stuff up and running although it feels quite artificial. The Coursera class has you use any IDE you are comfortable with and I think this makes for a more realistic scenario. I enjoyed David Rossiter’s lecture style and his slides and examples made the concepts easy to grasp.

Course 2 (and the rest of the series) has an instructor that I didn’t like as much - he put so little effort into creating the lectures that at some points in it he answers his office phone and doesn’t bother to edit it out. He doesn’t have a clear communication style and has weird pronounications for many technical terms - both of which make the lectures difficult to understand.

One of the things that makes FCC so wonderful IMO - is the support from the community. Just when you think you can’t figure something out you have a group of others that are trying to figure out (or have already figured out something you are working on. All Coursera classes have a discussion forum for this same purpose but it seems to have varying usefulness; I am taking a Ruby on Rails class where moderators and the instructor himself have reached out when I have had a problem. This is in contrast to the HK Full Stack series - it is more often than not that a student is not helped at all.

Course 3 is about Angular JS and includes the build tools Grunt and Gulp. The Angular code itself is fairly easy to implement and I was able to get some knowledge of it from this course. However - many students including myself had trouble getting the build tools to work correctly and got no support from the instructor or moderators. The problem with this is that later parts of the course rely on gulp running correctly and it is not possible to continue without it. I gave up once and started over (if you don’t finish the class you can start over the next time the class starts - this is usually in a few weeks) and the next time I was still not able to get Gulp to work correctly.

In Summary - I give the first class of this series (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) a ‘5’, the second course (Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools) a ‘3’, and the third course (Front-End Javascript Frameworks) a ‘1’.

3 Likes
2

I’ve only done course 1 and 2.

I put 4 stars for how much I’ve learned with the first two courses, so I don’t regret having had that introduction at all, but with the resources discovered after that and what I know today, I wouldn’t say this course is a must-have at all.

Positive :

  • I didn’t know anything at all when I took those two courses so it helped me understand how things were connected to each other, that alone was a great point for me.
  • Course 2 gave a great overview of Bootstrap, from the grid, pull, push, offset, to panels, accordions, carousels. That was really great as after that I was able to use Bootstrap documentation and more or less understand what was going on.

Cons:

  • For my part, the forums, discussions etc were completely dead. Not a soul out there.

I didn’t continue with Course 3 etc because I felt the leap was bit too much for me and I wanted to know more before moving on.

2 Likes
3

Wow, I didn’t know about all that Coursera, Udemy, edX, and Udacity had to offer until recently. I started FCC earlier last year, but my Senior Project and other classes have been taking up my time, unfortunately.I am working on my Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering Technology at the moment, and halfway through found a passion for programming. I didn’t know about all the other resources out there and sort of regret going to DeVry instead of some other more reputable college. I recently also started SkillCrush in hopes that it would give me structure, and it is mostly going over stuff I learned over FCC while offering less guidance and help than FCC.

Sorry for all of the back story. I have been looking for some other alternative and thought that either Coursera’s Full Stack or Udacity’s Full Stack programs might be worth the time and possibly money. From various reviews they both look good, but the nanodegree sounds more rigorous with more effort from Udacity to get you hired. Though Udacity’s nanodegree costs you money while coursera’s if either free or a whole lot cheaper. I have not decided on which one yet as I graduate in June and will have more time for courses focused on what I want to do instead of my EET degree.