By marjancek 5 months ago Completed

This is, hands down, the best on-line course I've taken so far.

Maybe it's the first-love effect, since this course first introduced the great interface now being used by edX, or perhaps because I really felt I learned a very difficult load of material driven by the thirst of green ticks.

The lectures are long but very interesting and the exercises are challenging and engaging. The provided book is also very good, and a rarity in on-line courses. Finally, the virtual laboratory was just simply great, and the forums even better than the current edX.

But the course is not for anyone; there's a lot of math(differential equations), and it takes a lot of work to pass it. Nevertheless, it is definitely worth it and I strongly recommend it with a 5/5.

By Steven Frank from Boston, Massachusetts 23 days ago Completed

This was an exhilarating and rewarding course from start to finish. I wrote about my experience here:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/review-mitxs-online-circuit-design-and-analysis-course

and since there was no resource like Coursetalk when I completed the course last June, I thought I'd now add my praise to the mix. MITx 6.002 is truly the gold standard to which all MOOCs should aspire.

By Equanimous Creativity from OSAA, Århus, Denmark 32 days ago Completed

I took this course when it was first offered at MITx.
In this course you lean to make fundamental calculation on resister, capacitors, coils, diodes, transistors and logic gates. If you looking for something more practical like learning to build a motor control for a simple robot this course is not it.

The course was very well organised at very good platform,
it was a pleasure to follow.

By Ilya from St. Petersburg 40 days ago Completed

Brilliant course! It's definitely the best introduction to electronics in Universe! Interesting material, clean explanations, well prepared quizzes, challenging homeworks and fun labs. I had no prior experience in electronics and decided to take this class when realized that for my home microcontroller experiments it's necessary to have better understanding of electronics basics. And this course exceeded my expectations. And yes - it takes some time (even more than NLP class), and you have to remember some math to complete this class (Hint for lazy people: WolframAlpha is an invaluable assistent for homeworks).

Pros:
- extremely useful and well-prepared lectures.
- artistic lecturer
- provided electronic book not only very usefull but also interesting reading
- In-brouser circuit simulator for Labs
- additional materials - tutorials and demonstrations
- quizzes really tests your understanding
- active foum

Cons:
- I can't find the next course from the same team ;-)

By Yuriy Skorenkyy from Ternopil 2 months ago Completed

The 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics is thoroughly prepared and brilliantly delivered. Within the course tutorials and demonstrations are put just where they should be to make lectures more comprehensible. Questions, labs and problems are very challenging and require careful consideration as well as profound knowledges. Though the course demands more time and effort that was announced by the instructor team, I believe it is worth the time spent.

By Vikrant Singh from Ranchi, Jharkhand 6 months ago Completed

I have completed this course (provided by MITx in April, 2012) with 93% and had great time doing this , it contains everything that you need to learn from basic concepts in electronics to high level concepts used in electronics industries . Lab exercises are well designed , they use a virtual simulation environment where you can simulate different circuits that you build . Mid term was easy it took only 3 hours to solve , Final term is little bit tougher than mid term . You will surely enjoy the discussion forum because of the following reasons.

1. Your queries are answer by smart students and with new way to think about the problem .
2. Your ideas will be appreciated if useful.
3. You will learn new tricks to solve the difficult problems

Important points:
1. As I have read other reviews , people are saying that course involve more mathematics than electronics it is not true , even if you don't understand the mathematics which is not important for the course , you will definitely enjoy building circuits in virtual Lab environment.
2. They will teach you mathematics part only for 1 or 2 weeks that's it not big deal
3. Mathematics part only contains how to solve Linear differential equations and they will also teach you to solve differential equations in intuitive way so don't worry and enjoy the course

By Tim Holyoake from Derby, England 8 months ago Completed

I took the first presentation of 6.002x when it was run under the MITx rather than the edX brand early in 2012. This review is an abridged version of one I posted on my blog at http://www.tenpencepiece.net/blog/2012/06/16/mitx-6-002x-post-mortem-2/ in June 2012

1. Course Content

I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more digital and more practical electronics in the course. There were a couple of weeks where I honestly thought I’d joined a maths course rather than an electronics one. However, having survived the whole experience I believe that the maths really was necessary to gain a proper insight into the subject. The content delivered was coherent and usually interesting. I think that it was my perception of the course before I took it which was to blame for my (very) slight disappointment of its scope.

2. Teaching method

While the material covered was comprehensive and videos / demos and exercises were accompanied by free access to a 1,000 page+ textbook, the way in which hand-written teaching slides were built during the video lectures wasn't that helpful. If this approach is to be retained in future, the legibility has to be a key area of focus. There’s a big difference between the meaning of vi, vI, Vi and VI in large/small signal analysis and while it’s obvious when you’re listening to the soundtrack, it’s definitely not easy to unpick if you review the lecture slides afterwards.

3. The virtual learning environment

Beautifully minimalist, well organised and easy to navigate and find material in. The discussion (question) forums have a couple of excellent features – such as the ability to tag posts (I found it incredibly useful and usually well done by the contributors) and the ability to easily identify staff contributions. However, the karma system (whereby students earn points off peers and can eventually become forum moderators) is ridiculous. There is rarely any correlation between a good forum moderator and valuable contributors.

4. Assessment

I liked the way that labs and homeworks were provided every week and contributed to the overall course grade. I even think that the ‘exam’ format used on 6.002x is a reasonable way of proceeding with assessment in the future, rather than having to incur the costs of travelling to and taking exams in a testing centre – provided that something can be done to deal with plagiarism and cheating.

5. Overall

I had a great time taking the course (it’s released the inner geek in me) and I’ll certainly take future edX courses should they appeal to my interests - indeed, I've just signed up for the autumn 2012 presentation of 6.00x on programming. I didn’t spend as much time as I really should have done on the course – probably a maximum of 5 or 6 hours per week (with the exception of the midterm and final exams, both of which took me around 8 hours to complete). Leaving aside the nonsensical hype about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the way that they will change education forever (they won’t, but they’re a valuable addition to the overall HE landscape) I wish the team at edX all the best for the future.

By Jeanne Boyarsky from New York 8 months ago Not Completed

While I had to drop this class, it was because I was traveling and I fell too far behind to catch up. It's not a fluffy course and once I was two weeks behind, I wasn't enjoying the forums anymore because people were too far ahead.

I did learn a lot at first. The pre-reqs were calculus, linear algebra and first year college physics. - And you need to remember them.

The lectures were longer than udacity/coursera. The quizes were well thought out exercises. You could submit as many times as you wanted or see the answers and backfigure from there. There were excellent forum discussions on the exercises as students posted worked answers.

The homework was similar to the quizzes in that there were unlimited retries. The big difference is that the answer wasn’t available until afterwards. There were also virtual labs where you could build circuits which was really cool. The homeworks/labs also generated different sets of numbers making it harder for people to cheat.

The forum has a lot of the features I like in stackoverflow – tags, showing tags, hiding tags and voting. It also has badges, karma and an easy way to see your topics/posts.

For a comparison with the SAAS class, see http://www.selikoff.net/2012/04/07/coursera-saas-class-and-mitx-circuits-class-feedback/