Alison - Review

Alison is an Irish higher education platform, supplying various certified and accredited online courses.

Once you create your account you can select from a wide variety of topics and courses.

As I am currently doing C# in one of my college modules, I decided to try out one of their C# courses to see if it would help.

The Experience

The course was divided into separate modules, each containing their own subsections within.

Each module begins with a "Learning Outcomes" page to give the user a quick rundown of what to expect in the upcoming lessons.

One important thing to note with Alison is that their courses seem to be extremely reliant on video tutorials. Unlike some other courses I have reviewed, they do not have any built-in code-along interactivity.

I felt these videos provided a good background on C#, as well as how to properly set up your workspace in Visual Studio. As the course progressed, they went into detail about topics such as classes, interfaces, events and functions.

Going through this course, I did find myself getting a bit tired of video after video with little to no knowledge testing/practice.

In terms of testing - to complete this course you must achieve over 80% on three separate quizzes. These questions are generally multiple-choice, or fill-in-the-blank style.

I would also like to mention that Alison uses ads to gain revenue to keep supplying their courses. You do have the option to pay to remove these ads from your account. I feel this is something to just be aware of, especially as some ads were pop-ups, and a bit distracting.

Who is it for?

I would suggest this course to someone who enjoys learning from Youtube-style tutorials. If you rely on practical, bite-size lessons to grasp concepts, I don't feel that this course is particularly for you.

Is it worth it?

Upon completing this course, you do not receive a certificate unless you pay for it, which is slightly disappointing, as this course takes a while to complete.

I personally don't love relying on video tutorials when it comes to coding. I sometimes find myself zoning out of concentration if I'm not actively engaging in a lesson, so for me, I didn't greatly enjoy the structure.

Ultimately, these are informative lessons. I think the creator did a good job explaining things clearly. I do however wish there was more interactivity, or more coding-based assessments, rather than just multiple-choice quizzes.

This course is quite extensive. Although this style is not my preference, I feel as though it will be most helpful to me as a tool which I can return to if I need to clarify certain aspects of C#, rather than a course to consume in full.

I definitely do see myself referring back to these videos in the future, but if you are looking for a course with a certificate to show for it, this may not be the choice for you.

Sources:

All images have been screenshot from Alison