Are Coursera courses worth it?
My experience of completing the UI/UX Design Specialization course on Coursera offered by CalArts
It is more than evident now that 2020 has been a rather unusual year. It has had all of us locked within the thresholds of our homes with our digital devices being the only effective windows of communication. I had to complete the majority of my thesis in this state and the experience was, well, unremarkable.
Upon completion of my master’s degree I found myself left with a couple of months of time before my job starts. Seeing the recent uptrend of online learning, courtesy of covid-19, I decided to give a shot.
Too many options
Following a quick research, I decided to take up the UI / UX Design Specialization course offered by CalArts on Coursera. It is a specialization course comprising of 4 courses. The recommended time was 16 weeks (4 weeks/ course), but given the amount of time I had in hand, I scrunched it within a month. I will start with a brief note on each of the courses and the assignments done. I will then review the combined experience towards the end of this article.
1. Visual Elements of User Interface Design
This was the introductory course and starts with the very basics of UI and UX. Fit for a beginner and a refresher for a practitioner. Since this was the introductory course, the assignments weren’t very challenging. The idea was to focus more on the visual aspects than the functional, which would be taken up in the later courses.
In this assignment I designed the mood board and screens for an app; Mr Tuner: A digital guitar tuner for the older generation.
2. UX Design Fundamentals
While the first course was more UI centric, this was heavily UX centric. The course touched upon all the major facets of UX, from ideation to site mapping to prototyping. All of the lessons were delivered in packets of video and reading material split in 4 weeks. At the end of each week was an assignment submission.
All of the submission were aimed towards making an app prototype. There was ample creative freedom to choose the idea for the app, as well the target audience that would be catered by it.
I designed a crowdsourcing app - Zimma. The idea is to use crowdsourcing to triangulate issues identified in infrastructure and tag the related authorities.
The final submission was to create a clickable prototype. I created using the screens I had already made and hosted it at InVision, you can find the same here.
3. Web Design: Strategy and Information Architecture
This course and the one following it are bundled and the following course can not be attempted without attempting this first. It expands on the skills gained from the first two courses.
The end product of this course was to arrive at a sitemap for a website/app of a fictitious restaurant, which is also the final deliverable of this course. This sitemap is preceded by ideation, strategy and scope; each of which take up a week of the course. While these concepts have been discussed earlier in the specialization; their application felt more real while attempting them through this course.
4. Web Design: Wireframes to Prototypes
The concluding course of the specialization was also the most challenging of the four. As the name suggests, this course focused on making prototypes from the UX research attempted in the previous course.
I, personally, found this course to be the most informative of the four. Particularly because it also dedicated one of the weeks to describe the backend of Web Design and the basics of HTML and CSS without actually venturing into coding.
This course also took prototyping up a notch by focusing on responsive design and branding as well. Illustrated below are the home screens of the Web and mobile platform. The final assignment required to have a complete set of screens for one of the platforms. I chose web, as I had already designed for mobile screens in course 2.
The learning Experience
I was initially a little skeptical before taking up the course as I had labored for 5+ months online for my Master’s Thesis. However, the major difference between my thesis being online and this online specialization was that this was designed to be an online learning experience, unlike my thesis; which was shifted online due to the pandemic.
There are two instructors for this specialization — Michael Worthington and Roman Jaster. The former is the instructor for the first and second courses and the later is for the rest. Moreover, while it is recommended to go in the sequential order but the program allows fluidity. I started courses 1,2 and 3 at once and finished in the sequence 3–4–2–1.
There are recorded lectures, readings, quizzes and assignments. Not all of the assignments are mandatory but there are, on an average, one assignment per week. Again, the weeks are only to group separate packets of information within the course and not binding. Hence, one can finish a week in one weekend, or even a course, if you don’t particularly like to sleep.
However, don’t expect to earn a certificate instantly, as the assignments that you submit are to be peer graded, and to qualify for peer grading, you must grade assignments for you peer first. There are reviews of a few people having issues with peer grading, however, it worked out well for me. Some of the feedback received in the grading were actually very inspiring. A typical assignment can take up to a couple of days to be peer reviewed but can be sped up by asking your peers for review in the forum.
…is it free?
Yes and no, and by that I mean no. Coursera offers you one week of free trial and while it may seem tempting to rush through the course to skip any payment, it is not humanly possible to complete the specialization in 7 days and 7 nights, and if you can, well, teach me sensei.
I completed the course in 5 weeks, 1 week of trial + 4 week of paid. The payment works on a subscription basis. While subscribed to the specialization, you can access to all of the courses and enroll to any or all of them. Also, if this is your first course on Coursera, depending upon where you live, you can avail a 50% discount. I paid roughly ₹1800 (~25$) for the one month I had subscribed to it.
Should I take up the course?
It is totally your call. While Coursera claims that the specialization amps up your career prospects, I can’t back it up as I’m writing this right after finishing the course. However, if you have the time, this is quite an informative course and you also get a certificate after completing each course and one for completing the specialization, which you can brag on LinkedIn.
Note, this course does demand knowledge of some software as a prerequisite, such as, illustrator and Adobe XD.
You can find my projects for these courses here — On a Roll, Zimma, Mr. Tuner.
You can find this specialization here.
