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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Blockchain Basics by University at Buffalo

4.6
stars
7,494 ratings

About the Course

This first course of the Blockchain specialization provides a broad overview of the essential concepts of blockchain technology – by initially exploring the Bitcoin protocol followed by the Ethereum protocol – to lay the foundation necessary for developing applications and programming. You will be equipped with the knowledge needed to create nodes on your personal Ethereum blockchain, create accounts, unlock accounts, mine, transact, transfer Ethers, and check balances. You will learn about the decentralized peer-to-peer network, an immutable distributed ledger and the trust model that defines a blockchain. This course enables you to explain basic components of a blockchain (transaction, block, block header, and the chain) its operations (verification, validation, and consensus model) underlying algorithms, and essentials of trust (hard fork and soft fork). Content includes the hashing and cryptography foundations indispensable to blockchain programming, which is the focus of two subsequent specialization courses, Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications (Dapps). You will work on a virtual machine image, specifically created for this course, to build an Ethereum test chain and operate on the chain. This hands-on activity will help you understand the workings of a blockchain, its transactions, blocks and mining. Main concepts are delivered through videos, demos and hands-on exercises....

Top reviews

TT

Nov 18, 2018

This is an introductory course to Blockchain. The supplemented material (in other words self-study) is excellent and in my opinion is the only way to master the concepts and details of this discipline

LR

Jul 29, 2019

Comprehensive and clear course that summarize the basic concepts to understand the blockchain technology. Also the resources and contents included are very valuables. I totally recommend this course.

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1 - 25 of 1,875 Reviews for Blockchain Basics

By Marko M

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Feb 24, 2019

Quality of recorded lectures is substandard. Most of the reference material are websites which have not necessarily gone through a peer review. Quizzes are trivial. This should not be paid content. It is an equivalent of a youtube / google search on the topic.

By Debashish C

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Feb 24, 2019

Blockchain in itself is a very complex topic to study & teach. I think the material could have been made lore suitable to "laymen" by simplifying the language of delivery, currently it sounds very "academic" and "quoted" from published material, not colloquial. Though the Videos are short, via the reference material too much is being left on the student to "go figure" on their own, I think instead of ref material more stuff could have been included via lectures. The final project was a let-down, it should be more hands-on (for example: why provide a GUI, you could have provided the CLI commands and asked students to execute the commands), it did not really pose the challenge one expects. Even with the GUI, I failed to appreciate the flow that the project was supposed to teach me. Either that or may be at 47 I am getting too old to study :)

By Ghifari R

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Sep 6, 2018

the introductory is really, really bad. I went through all the videos and get 100% of the quiz yet I still have ZERO ideas about the overall architecture. Thankfully, I found a website http://learnmeabitcoin.com that gives me a way more comprehensive explanation about blockchain. Why pay $40/mo if I can get a much better resource for free? Moreover, why are there so many people who rate this course 5-star???

By Theodore T

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Nov 19, 2018

This is an introductory course to Blockchain. The supplemented material (in other words self-study) is excellent and in my opinion is the only way to master the concepts and details of this discipline

By Abdul M S

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May 5, 2020

Teaching style is not very good. Seems like she's just reading the content and does not have the knowledge herself.

By Leonardo R

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Jul 30, 2019

Comprehensive and clear course that summarize the basic concepts to understand the blockchain technology. Also the resources and contents included are very valuables. I totally recommend this course.

By Rahul V J

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Feb 23, 2019

If you really don't know anything of block chain and want to become a pro who want to actively participate in adoption of the block chain, then this is the course is definitely the stepping stone for you.

By Mahendra S

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Nov 21, 2018

such an interesting course but the delivery is so disappointing

By A T M H U

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Dec 25, 2020

A comprehensive and clear course that summarizes the basic concepts to understand blockchain technology. Also, the resources and contents included are very valuables. I totally recommend this course.

By fabian d

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Oct 15, 2018

The course was really good. Had to do the final in 2 separate computers mac osx and windows. hard to know which one took.. there is no way to interact with the professor??

By M U

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Jan 1, 2020

One of the Best course for Absolutely Beginners :-) Discussed Core Fundamental Factors of Blockchain of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Amazing Resources & Really Helpful Content. Thanks Bina Ramamurthy Ma'am.

By Sahil S

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Jul 28, 2018

I find this course helpful to absolute beginner and for one who wants to grasp the basic concepts of Blockchain . The tutor tried to explain most part with simplicity and good and sufficient details.

By Upendra A

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Jun 28, 2020

Course was great ,no doubt but at last assignment when all virtual setup and installation was required there was no support from either cousera or course provider. People with limitation on installing such software should given alternative of that assignment to get certificate.After 19 hour of learning learner deserved certification should not be taken because he/she does not have environment that suppoet mining of crypto .

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By Johannes

•

Jun 17, 2020

This course is

a) outdated. All "further reading" links are from 2018, and out of those, half don't even exist anymore.

b) frustrating. The final assignment is run on a Virtualbox VM which you might, or might not get installed on your machine. There are hundreds of graduates-wanna-be that get stranded at this stage because that technology doesn't work on Win10, or on the machine that they have.

The content is fine, but presented in a very old-fashioned way.

I did learn something new (but nothing a bit of googling couldn't have provided), having it presented in a structured format was helpful but i would NEVER recommend this course to anyone.

Disappointed.

By MATTHEW P

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Apr 30, 2021

Sorry but this is a terrible course. The instructor has zero charisma, reading off an autocue with filmed from weird camera angles. And it's doubly difficult to follow because she has a very strong accent and you need to keep double checking the script text to follow what she is saying. Here we find the grammar and sentence construction is all over the place. typos, missing words, dropped indefinite articles. It's a mess.

The topic list is great - looks really interesting and purports to be exactly what I am looking for - a high level overview of crypto tech, not shying away from the details but not going to a level that a programmer needs to know.

But the implementation is all over the place. Within a lesson, we range from high level concepts to detail that only a engineer needs to know, and back again. I'm a computer science grad and ex-programmer so used to the concepts. But the way it's presented is really hard to follow.

And despite all that crazy detail, many of the actual details needed to answer the quiz questions are not actually covered in the lessons, so you're left guessing or trying to research the answers on the fly during the test. Worse, some of the links to tools that you actually need to use during the test to answer a question are broken.

I think there are great teachers, and great subject matter experts. Sometimes you are lucky and get both. On a virtual teaching course, I believe you minimally need more teaching skills than subject matter skills, since someone else can prepare the material for you. In this case, sadly we've got a complete mishmash.

By Rodrigo G F

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Jul 9, 2018

Poor support in the forums. I had a technical issue with the final project that couldn't solve. After another person and I reported it repeatedly, no tutor replied, thus making us go over the deadline.

By Denis I

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Oct 10, 2019

Very mechanical delivery, not engaging, and overly simplistic material.

By Joseph A

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Mar 23, 2019

Learned a lot in this course. The only frustration was with completing the final programming assignment. The assignment wasn't difficult. What was difficult was the "Environment Set up."! Importing the Ethereum file into VM and executing it! Please specify the browser type (e.g. firefox, not Chrome) and VM version in the BODY of the programming assignment, not in the FAQs! This will eliminate 90% of the frustration and will speed up completion of the final assignment.

By Debaditya C

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Nov 9, 2018

Didn't really enjoy the course. There is a lot of assigned reading. The actual content is very light.

By Nirva B

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May 8, 2019

Great teacher - programming assignment needs more details to follow

By Ellen B G

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Jul 28, 2018

I was disappointed in the course. It was more like a suggested reading list than a course with 2-7 minute lectures. The resources were pretty good, but no better than what I could have looked up myself.

By Nikolay F

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May 26, 2021

Virtualbox required. Bad for modern M1 mac users.

By Arqam S

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Jul 6, 2020

Provides excellent understanding of basic concepts of Blockchain. This course is relatively short and you'll only learn concepts. But the concepts are conveyed in a beautiful manner. I recommend this to anyone who is interested in Blockchain technology and wants to explore his/her interest!

By NAMAN L

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Jul 13, 2020

It is a great and awesome course for total beginners, no prerequisite required, video lectures are short and crisp, moreover, the reading material attached is worth reading for a deep understanding of the core concepts. Anyone can easily complete the full course within 2-4 days.

By Julio C T d S

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Feb 27, 2019

As an introductory level course, it was a good jumpstart into the technology. But I think it could dive further into the details of real world use cases. Otherwise, it is perfect for a beginner like myself.