Why did I start the certificate course

I purchased the coursera plus subscription in the beginning of this month to revamp my skills. I had already been doing some of the meta front end courses and completed the videos and tasks.

The progress

I had been doing UI for some time and as I had completed the tasks ahead, I mostly did the quizzes and submitted my assignments with minor changes if any for most the courses. So I completed five of the below courses without breaking much sweat,

• Intro to web dev
• Programming with js
• Version Control
• HTML and CSS in depth
• React Basics

The next courses took some time,

• Advanced React
  • I spent some time to complete the final assignment, using stuff like Formik library was new to me and I also had to revisit the concepts to attempt the quizzes. I completed this quiz on Jul 3rd.
• Principles of UX/UI Design
  • Unlike the previous courses I had neither watched the course videos fully ahead nor completed the final assignment, so I had to watch the videos and then do the quizzes and assignments. This was pretty challenging as I hadnt delved into UX designs in my work experience, although using figma was enjoyable, finding out the tools to use was challenging. If wireframes werent daunting enough :), the course had journey maps, user persona in assignments, so overall I had to review the stuff back and forth. In the overall courses, this is one course I still wanna revisit as I dont rememeber all the design principles mentioned.

Those were the coures I had done till the prev week (Jul 11th).

My review

The good parts

Other than the Intro and git course, I found the rest of the courses to be pretty valuable and learnt new things from it. There were one or few things I learnt newly from HTML,CSS, JS courses. At the same time, the structure of the content also helped me to prepare for interviews. For the react part, I intend to review the advanced part with a new project. And UI/UX is something I plan to revisit for later as there are more things to learn there and it isn’t too critical at this point for me. As far coursera experience is concerned, I didnt try any commmunity support for the courses, the assigments were reviewed quickly.

The bad part

Assignment review feedback isnt that great - there is no productive feedback 90% of the times. To add up to it, I saw for the react course - that reviewed it as “Nice project” but reduced points incorrectly in the marking criteria. The problem is coursera is taking the average in this case, so your grades are affected. You need to resubmit again for review which I didnt bother to do.

As of writing, I completed the capstone and currently doing the interview prep course. With update my experience after completing the course.