Responsive Web Design on Coursera by University of London Goldsmiths
As the British might say, this Coursera course is “bloody good” and is a very good intermediate-level introduction to design & development practices in creating responsive Web sites. Unlike some other courses on Coursera, this one features videos in which you can watch the faculty (there are 3 instructors who feature regularly throughout the course videos) writing code from scratch that you can follow along to on your own computer, which ends up helping a lot with the learning process. I appreciated the strong focus on both design and development, as well as the opportunity to learn more about frameworks including Bootstrap and Handlebars. Although it could be said that the course moves quite fast, particularly for a 4-week course, I found it to be just the right pace for me, especially as a follow-up course to the previous one in the specialization, Responsive Website Basics: Code with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which was more beginner-friendly. As in the previous course, the videos were very professionally done with slick intros & outros for the University of London Goldsmiths, and it was clear that the faculty were very well-prepared for this course in advance. The only con I might cite, and I hesitate to call it a con because it may just be a cultural thing as an American, but the British faculty weren’t very friendly-looking on camera some of the time which was a bit off-putting. But the technical merits of the course far outweighed that aspect and made it a veritable “treasure trove” of knowledge for front-end Web design & development.
Conclusion: Recommended for anyone still in the early stages of learning front-end Web development looking for more learning resources.
Rating: 4 out of 5 (-1 star for the fast pacing and on-camera presentation of the faculty at times)
