Networked Life: Course Review

Networked Life is course offered by the University of Pennsylvania through Coursera, which provides a gentle introduction to network and graph theory. It covers the basics of network structure, network formation models and networked games. The course consists of 7 weeks of lecture content--typically three 8-20 minute videos per week--with a 8-10 question quiz for each video. The quizzes aren't too difficult and you get 2 attempts, but since there is one quiz for every lecture video, you'll be spending a significant proportion of your total class time answering quiz questions. The course doesn't get into network algorithms or computing: it focuses on basic network structure, formation and games, so you can take this course without any programming or math background.


Networked Life debuted about 2 years ago, making it among the first courses available on Coursera, so the presentation and slide quality are a bit dated. The lecturer mainly reads directly off slides and you spend the majority of lecture time looking at static slides written in Comic Sans as the lecturer explains them in greater detail. The information is solid and generally interesting but the presentation is often a bit dull when there are no illustrations on the screen. The quizzes are probably the best part of the course; even though they are easy they help reinforce the content and break what might otherwise become a tedious slog through lecture video after lecture video. The course is self-paced, so despite it having "7 weeks" of content, you can finish it faster if you want to.


Networked Life is an accessible introduction to networks and while the presentation isn't great, the topics are interesting and the frequent quizzes help keep you engaged.

I give networked like 3.5 out of 5 stars: Good.