A little about the course itself
This is a four week course offered on Coursera by Meta that I took part in completing. It's made up of video lessons (that offer transcripts for thiose that prefer to read instead of listen) and interactive questions built into some of them, reading material to help further build upon what has been taught in the videos, group discussions where I was able to interact with others that have enrolled and taken part in the course, ungraded labs which allowed me to put into practice what has been taught in the videos and see if I have understood them, there are quizes that follow, to test and check you have actually participated in the labs, and/or read/listened to the material in the video lectures.
What did I study?
The course is broken down into four weeks.
In week one, I learnt about the different types of web developers and their roles and responsibilities comparing the differences between front-end, back-end, and full-stack developers. It touched upon the core technologies of HTML, CSS, and Javascript and I was able to explore the key concepts that underpin how the internet works. While week two covered constructing HTML documents and adding basic styling using CSS, so far nothing out of the ordinary. Week three covered using Bootstrap, a powerful framework that allows for the building of responsive interfaces, it also covered the benefits of working with and using UI frameworks. Week four highlighted the information learnt over the past three weeks, and held the assessment for the course.
How did it go?
I won't lie, this first course; part of Meta's 9-course certification, was passed with relative ease, I had made some errors, but that was more on me not reading the questions carefully and rushing through the tests to get them done, which resulted in dropped marks. However, the course itself instead of taking four weeks to complete, took a lot less, I could have done most of it in one day if I started first thing in the moring and worked through to the evening, but I have been splitting it up a bit more, and so it took a couple days to get through all the material.
I found that some parts were explained well and I was able to understand more about what I already knew. While other features, such as the ungraded labs, felt a bit pointless, they provided the code you were expected to output prior to you opening up the lab (which does so in a new window), which - at least to me makes the whole point of them irrelivant (this may change further down the line as the courses become more and morer difficult), I would understand if the lab provided what they expected the outpout to look like, and gave certain restrictions to how it could be done, allowing for the student to work on the problem themselves without holding their hand along the way. However,the quiz right after the ungraded lab ensures that you must be actively participating in it, and sometimes they came after some of the video lessons, where they ask questions on the lab and lectures with the fact that the questions can vary on each attempt of the quiz.
What's next?
So I've signed up for the 9-course professional certificate, with "Introduction to Javascript" next. I look forward to trying this out as I have struggled with Javascript in the past and would like to improve my abilities in this area.