I enrolled in CSU Global's new Web Application Dev...

I enrolled in CSU Global's new Web Application Development certificate program during early 2020, hoping to gain some new skills after being furloughed due to COVID19 so that I could pursue a job in the web design/development industry. I am now four classes into the program, and am finding myself disappointed, frustrated, and like this school has taken advantage of me financially.

This has got to be one of the most poorly planned programs I have ever encountered. The classes cover only the barest basics of their respective focuses, and certainly don't give you enough information to even think about applying for a job in any computer science field. In addition, the order of the classes makes no sense whatsoever. The curriculums do not build on previous info or skills learned - so get ready to forget everything you picked up in the class before as the next one veers off in some seemingly random direction that basically ignores each class that came before it. I understand that there are many different topics to cover in this field, but I firmly believe the course content planners could have found ways to integrate each skill learned into the following classes so they build on each other and keep the skills fresh in students' minds.

There is little-to-no instructor interaction, and when the professors do give responses to things they feel extremely generic and pre-planned, almost as though a bot program is giving you feedback rather than a human. The "lectures" are laughably useless (they are not even spoken lectures but handfuls of poorly written paragraphs that essentially paraphrase straight from the textbook), leaving you feeling as though the only useful tool aside from some of your peers (if you're lucky) is the textbook. Does paying $1000+ dollars for a textbook seem cool? Not so much... and that's basically what these classes feel like. They have almost zero original content and instead link to other websites and other institutions videos to provide you with your "education".

In summary, I probably could have just hopped on w3schools.com or simply Googled whatever keyword describes each course's content and received a learning experience that was just as good if not better than in each of these courses. I cannot speak for the other programs CSUG offers, but I strongly recommend caution when thinking about applying for this school. This feels like a money-grab more than anything else, and if I could do this over again I would rather have paid more money for higher quality classes somewhere else. I will probably be dropping out of this program because I would rather save the money for the last two courses and cut my losses than continue to spend money and get nothing but disappointment in return. An unfortunate experience all around.