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I was disappointed to see how little effort was put in to design this course. I was expecting more since this course seemed to get a decent rating based on Coursera user feedback. The course provides some very helpful resources to go back to later when learning more about cybersecurity and keeping up with the most up to date news and research. The course attempts to teach important concepts, but the lecture delivery method is just poor.

For starters, the video lecture designs were just sloppy -- poor audio recordings, typos on the slides and in the written transcripts, slide graphics were not visible most of the time (even when viewing in full-screen mode). Many acronyms and terms were not clearly defined or defined at all. This should be a number 1 priority for a beginners' course. The written transcripts for each of the lecture slide simply just transcribed the audio and did not correct any transcription mistakes when they appeared. There should also be helpful written guides creating outlines for each of the units and the terms/concepts presented.

This course has a 7-day free trial, but I canceled before the trial was over. It is not worth paying for something where there is clearly very little effort put into making the course.

Overall disappointed because I expected more from IBM since they have top experts in this field.

I am always grateful for free access to learning, but this was not amazing.

The course seems like it was patched together from disconnected fragments of old IBM training sessions. The audio quality is often poor. The subtitles are full of errors and [inaudible] tags. The presenters are doubtless knowledgeable, but often do not teach very well. For a beginner course, acronyms and technical language appear frequently without explanation. The explanations are sometimes good, but only sometimes. At other times, I found myself losing the thread of the lecture repeatedly.

The quiz questions are sometimes badly written and force you to guess what they mean. Others simply do not support the learning well. For example, instead of asking you about the concepts, they might test you on exactly what wording was used on a particular slide.

The quality of the slides is also highly variable. Some are fine. Others are garbled acronym salads with incomprehensible diagrams and ancient clip-art, featuring text that is multicoloured for no obvious reason and entirely in Comic Sans. I swear this is true.

It is still great to have free access to information. If you are interested, then it might be worth your time. But personally I could not recommend that anybody pays the monthly subscription fee for this.

I will say that there is a lot of great information in this course but it is like taking a history class, they tell you information, you take notes and do some reading, then you take a test based off of what they went over in the course. There was no real information that you could actively take and use, at least not right away. You will need to continue taking more and more courses/certificates before you can gain the knowledge and wherewithal for the actually used tools to obtain a job in this field.

I huge downside to this course is this was recorded as if you were in a meeting with someone and I felt like there was a lot of stumbling, stuttering, mumbling, coughing, pauses and more that they could have gone back and re-recorded or something so that you could fully understand and get what they were trying to say. There were even parts of the transcription and closed captioning of the audio didn't even pick up on and had to put "in-audible".

For such a huge company I feel as if the quality of the audio and even the videos provided could have been better.

The content of the course was pretty good, but the audio and video quality was atrocious. It felt like I was watching an amateur video on YouTube from 2005 - not a video made by a prominent company as part of a professional course in 2023. The text was often unreadable, and the audio was often inaudible - which prompted me to turn on the closed captions, which I assume was autogenerated, unfortunately, since it often had the wrong words and for the inaudible parts simply had "[inaudible]"... Apart for that, each video started with a short introduction to the video, which would have been fine, if A, the audio levels were normalized with the rest of the video (my ears were blasted several times by the intro because the rest of the video had much quieter audio), and B, if it added any meaningful value - it was just a summary of what you're going to learn, before EVERY video, so there were about 20 2 minute videos that were all preceded with a 20 second intro that meant nothing...

I signed up for the 7 Day Free Trail for the IBM Cyber-security Analyst Professional Certificate. This is definitely a cert I would be interested in completing but unfortunately the lecture audio is so bad that I will have to un-enrollment as I can't justify shelling out $49 per month for such terrible and unclear audio quality and instructors. The material itself seems interesting but I literally cannot hear or understand 75% of what the presenter is trying to say in the lectures. I tried turning on the subtitles but that's just no way to learn... Unfortunate because I think this certification path has potential but I could literally create a YouTube video on my $300 laptop with no special equipment that would sound better than what IBM is putting out here. I bought a Security+ course on Udemy for $9.99 and it seems to basically have all the same type of material plus the lecture audio / instructor is clear and concise in their presentation.

With an IT course, (especially from IBM) I believe the quality of production such as audio and video should be top notch. In many of the presentations, the audio sounds like it is in a hallway or in the background. Very poor audio. A cheap dedicated microphone would solve this issue and sound more professional. I expect more from IBM. Also, it seems the terminology is all over the place and the lessons don't seem to have any order to them. Many of the speakers' English skills were not at a native level, so sometimes it was difficult to pick up on the technical jargon. I am an ESL teacher and I welcome multilingual individuals, but with a professional course, I believe this should be done by native English speakers. If this course was for Spanish learners, I would expect a native Spanish instructor for ease of learning. I feel I didn't learn much with this course.

This course is very summary-level. After taking, I realized the whole specialization/certificate would likely provide only a cursory overview of the field, and nothing close to what would be required get a job in this area. I think one could learn more about cybersecurity from perusing wikipedia than they could with this course.

Additionally, this course seems hastily put together, with many different speakers from lesson to lesson. Each host offers a wildly different level of knowledge and didactic ability. I get the feeling the lessons were spliced together from some sort of internal training process, where the cyber team was trying to educate management and other departments on what exactly they do.

The arbitrary nature of quiz questions reinforces the idea that not much thought was put into the overall informational value of this course.

While the information is fair/good, it is very difficult to grasp as the recordings are very low in quality compared to many other online courses. Additionally, some instructors speak with an accent, which complicates things much more than needed. In fact, if some of the transcripts read (inaudible). Lastly, it seems that it would be much better if the instructors would follow a prewritten script. I find myself focusing too much on the flaws rather than the content. As a note, I speak two languages and English is my second. My wife is of Latin descent and I am used to listening to accents, but it still makes it very challenging to get through the course material. Hopefully, IBM will revise this course using better delivery methods. Nonetheless, I'll continue with the course as I am determined to earn my certification.

Audio and video quality isn't very good. Content is all over the place and often repetitive and the slide content doesn't always match what the speaker is talking about. It feels very cobbled together rather than a cohesive course. In addition, the quiz questions are sometimes poorly worded and confusing. There were also lots of mistakes in the transcription which makes it hard to follow at times as I usually need subtitles to aid with my hearing and taking in information, especially if the audio quality isn't great.

It's an ok overview and introduction but there are better courses out there, on Pluralsight for example. I was required to do this course for work but otherwise likely wouldn't have stuck with it. At least you get a badge at the end.

This was a nice learning experience, but not all of it was so good. The audio get real choppy and broken in A LOT of the video's. The subtitles don't really match up, and in some areas even the subtitles don't know what the instructor is saying. Sometimes the sub's say "cat" instead of "hat" hackers. And it doesn't seem very accurately copied. These lessons talk a lot about the years previous. Like right now it's 2023. But these video's are speaking in the years of 2019, 2020, 2022. I don't know. I like that the video's are short and to the point, but some of the reading material....I mean this say's it's an intro, and for beginners....but what they wanted you to read....it just seemed to loose me at a few points as a for real beginner.

I am surprised by the lack of professionalism in some of the videos presented in this course. It felt as though some of the instructors did not practice what they were going to teach before they presented in the class. The course material does give you a solid understanding CyberSecurity and if you have any experience in IT or CyberSecurity, you should do just fine in this course. The biggest issue I have though is that the exams at the end of each course force you wait 8 hours if you fail the exam to take it again. I think IBM did this so that nonone could zoom through their course, but it really stifles learning when you have to wait that long. I think if they changed it to 3 hours it might satisfy more people, myself included.

If you've ever taken an IBM training before, you'll know what to expect here.

PROS: Provides a functional introduction to cybersecurity and will give you foundational knowledge like terminology, roles, types of threats and threat actors etc.

CONS: Audio quality is poor in several videos - I used the transcripts to get through. The course is very repetitive and seems pieced together from unrelated recordings someone shoehorned into a single course. Some videos contradict each other or add confusion rather than building on previous knowledge.

If you just need to get the basics and the language down, I recommend this course. However, I recommend you just read the transcripts, skim a couple videos, and generally blaze through it.

This was a challenge. Between the Audio issues and some of the Translations and the Dialects, OMG I was so over it. I had to go over this several times. This was a complete Headache. I was stressed and constantly SMH. I just wanted this to be over with. I was really hoping for the better. The best part of all of this was the lady that comes on for the Introduction. She was so very clear and speaks very well. Please please get instructors to have visuals with Most of the lessons and have more content relevant to the Quiz/Practice Questions. I feel for the Translators. This was challenging but I got through it and I am extremely reluctant on completing another course. Thank you for your time and consideration.

The quality of the video lecture is quite bad. Some lectures have inaudible parts. This is made worse as the slides are not comprehensive on their own. The video lectures are not engaging. The presentations are frequently not smooth. The presentation style is more suited for conference presentation and not helpful for lesson lecture. Frequently, a static slides is shown and voiced over for more than 2 minutes. Some animations may be good for highlighting important parts and capturing audience attention. An ok course if you just wanna sit back, relax and get an impression of the topic. But if you are serious about learning cybersecurity, this does not make for a pleasant experience.

This course was difficult enough on its own. But when you add in someone who's english is very hard to understand, and then mix it with improper transcripts, it makes learning this information, unnecisarily more difficult. It would not be that hard to rerecord these videos. And to have someone trancribe them, then send them to the person who did the video, to review the words chosen for the transcript.

Also some of the videos had very poor quality. The sound was near impossible to hear. And the images were very blurry. The transcription is of poor quality in some areas. You are expecting us to learn this and not providing acurate or easy to understand instrucions on how to learn.

It's a good intro, but seems really cheesy. It feels like they did a whole lecture, but then broke it down to fit into this online course. They will reference slides, but we haven't seen the other ones yet. And then the sound quality is really bad. Some sound like they are in a bunker somewhere. And the worst part if that when you read the text below the video, you'll see things like (inaudible). So you're not given the actual lecture notes - it's someone just listening to it at some other time, and not understanding it. With all of this it seems very unprofessional and you have to wonder if it's worth paying for, and what this website is all about.

The speech to text within the course was not really all that great and there was no addendum's or corrections to these mistakes. Further, the instructor did make a few mistakes which was also not rectified. To which I only picked up while I was listening to a cyber security audio book, Dawn of the Code War. I highly recommend that these are fixed and I hope that this doesn't occur on the courses where you can complete a capstone project? The information contained and progression on this was good and hopefully will have given me a good foundation for when I go to apply for the Applied Technology Focusing in Cyber Security Degree next year.

Cheers, Brendon

The course audio quality is very poor. Each video has a brief introduction describing what the video goals and objectives are. That audio is fine. However, once the lesson begins, the instructor voice volume is low and unclear. It is like listening to a recorded telephone call. I spent a lot of time watching the transcript and not the video. Even the transcripts have many areas labeled [inaudible].

The audio quality is distracting and time consuming. I will choose another certificate provider.

Edit: I lowered my rating of this course after taking courses offered by other providers with much better quality material.

I'm now one week in and I have to say I was surprised about the poor quality of the course. the information within the course is good although some things aren't really regarded as basics BUT all videos so far are with poor audio quality, and just a few powerpoint slides with some pictures of graphs.. I feel like I'm in university again. it's hard to enjoy the content cause it's so "black and white" and not engaging enough. it would be great to have better prepared courses in which maybe the people directly talk to you via good quality video and audio so you feel more inclined to follow what they say.

[Poorly produced videos - Horrible audio. Verbose and confusing grammar from some speakers]

The audio quality of the video, specially the presenters, are often bad as I mentioned in my comments on each. The delivery as well needs your close attention as more often the way the presenters speak were not intelligible and verbose. I heard sniffing sounds and encountered varying volume levels on speakers' presentation, made worse by wrong grammatical expressions. I can't help but replaying the videos of skipping them.

The content needs updating as I saw slides dated 2018.

The content of the course is good, without a question. But the way it's presented is not the kind i would expect it from a company like IBM. The sound quality of half of the videos is very poor. Sometimes it sounds as if it was recorded during a long distance phone call. One video obviously was recorded in an office while a tenacious visitor standing outside keeps knocking on the door. As most of the content is delivered by those videos, at most half of them in bad quality and hard to understand it does not really encourage you to keep on learning.

Bad audio, at times incomprhensible sentences. The audio should be clear, with no background noises. Some speakers had their audio recorded from their earphone microphones. Not acceptable. No glossary, so some terms and abbreviations used stay a mystery... Some speakers were to monotone, it was difficult to keep attention. Some deviated from their main thought mid-sentence, then jumped to a different topic, then back to the original thought. Some speakers basically read the slides.

I do not think this was worth my money.

The course relies on memory, not understanding. The audio was almost unintelligible, at times it sounded as if the lecturers were speaking from a satellite phone.

The course jumped from being extremely slow, in the first modules, to reliance on understanding of abbreviations that sometimes only have relevance in the US. There was little mention of European contrasts.

The assertion that this course requires little or no background knowledge is false. It’s a good job that I had years of prior experience in this field.

The content is in-line with an intro to cyber security course, however, the questions and materials are plagued by grammar and spelling errors. Some of the quiz questions are incredibly vague leaving too much room for interpretation. The quizzes seem to test for semantics and memory of frivolous details over practical content. It's obvious IBM (or whoever they contracted) did not put much effort into this. Needs a good edit and overhaul but otherwise a good review of the basics.