As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve started some introductory Computer Science courses, in preparation for starting my BSc in April with the University of London online course
As far as I can tell, the introductory courses offered on Coursera, are excerpts from the full degree courses, so give an accurate feel for the workload involved.
So far it’s been a really mixed experience. There are three courses on offer so I decided to try all of them, as I’m auditing the courses which means there isn’t a deadline.
One of the courses, How Computers Work, has been a breeze. I’m already pretty familiar with the subject matter, and by watching the videos at 1.50x or even 2x speed I have gotten through the first two weeks of content in a couple of hours. I can’t access the assessment for this modules, but I think they are essay-style questions.
The second course, Introduction to Programming, has also been pretty quick to work through in terms of the materials on offer. However I got confused about the assessment and thought that the whole course assessment had to be done in the first week.
I went back and checked the instructions and concluded that these weren’t at all clear! The assessment took around 9 hours in total, which was supposed to be spread across 3 weeks. This feels manageable, but I do have quite a bit of experience here, so someone new to programming might struggle.
The third course, Mathematics for Programming, has been a whole different board game. The material is by far the most challenging, but it’s also the most enjoyable.
That said, I’ve been working through the first week for around 8 hours now, and still haven’t finished!! The mathematics course will be one of the first modules I do for the degree, so I’ll need to keep this in mind.
I’m planning on studying two modules initially, so hopefully if the other module has a lighter workload, I can give maths the time it needs 😰
One thing that I’ve struggled with across all three courses is the reliance on video content. I much prefer reading content so I can skim over the parts I’m more familiar with, and spend more time working through the harder sections. Every video has a transcript, but I often feel like I’m missing content when I rely on these alone.
Thankfully the built in player can be sped up, so I’ve been able to get through the videos pretty quickly.
So far I’m half way through the first two courses, and less than 1/6th of the way through the Mathematics course 😳 So there’s still a lot to do, and plenty to blog about.