Review of the course Cryptography I
Back to the courseFirst Impressions of Coursera
I signed up for the Coursera course on cryptography earlier this summer. The course is from Stanford University and taught by computer science professor Dan Boneh. Between work and vacation, I’ve only just recently had the chance to test out the course. With Coursera in the news for adding 12 more universities to its stable, I thought I would share a few initial impressions here on the blog.
First, a bit about the components of the course. It’s a six week course aimed at advanced undergrads or grad students, so it moves pretty fast.
For each week, there are a set of video lectures, each featuring PowerPoint slides, Professor Boneh’s audio narration, and some “digital ink” annotations by Prof. Boneh. Most videos are between 12 and 25 minutes in length.
Each week also features a problem set consisting of a mix of multiple-choice and free-text questions. The questions are computer-graded, so the free-text questions have well-defined answers (like a particular number or a message that must be deciphered). Each problem set has a deadline, and if you turn in your problem set after its deadline, you only get half credit.
The course has active discussion boards, with sections for general discussion, discussion about the video lectures, and discussion about the problem sets. There’s also a board devoted to helping students set up study groups. More on that below.
There will be a final exam at the end of the course. I haven’t seen it yet, naturally, but I’m assuming it will be a longer version of the problem sets, that is, a lengthy quiz featuring the same kind of computer-graded questions.
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