Today I completed Build Intelligent Agents Using DeepSeek & N8N on Coursera. I was really impressed at the start of the first module when there was an interactive AI that dynamically and interactively quizzed me on the content of the material covered. It was more of a showcase of the Coursera Coach than an integral part of the course. I think there are a lot of people who will benefit from this feature on Coursera, and it is available throughout this course, and I have seen it on others. I’m not sure how ubiquitous it is across other courses.
If you have ever worked with one of those people where, if you ask them how to do something they send you one or more links, this course is sort of like working with that person. Most Coursera courses have those Recommended Reading sections that provide useful extra material. I like to bookmark them for future reference, but rarely read them during the course. That approach won’t work with this course, as the quizzes cover content in those courses. I found that having Perplexity summarize the links for me was sufficient to start passing the quizzes. Mostly. There were still questions that I did not recognize from the videos nor the summaries, and a couple of times I read the external content directly and still didn’t find the source of the question.
I don’t just take these courses to hang a certificate on the wall (anymore, though there was a time before 2010 when I collected enough to stack over an inch high, partially shown below).
Coursera does a best score of up to three attempts, so if I get less than 100% I will repeat it until I do get 100% so that I am certain I have learned the material. The last Coursera course I completed (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence by IBM) I happily pointed out that the quality of the video instruction lead to my consistent 100% scores. For this n8n course, I can honestly say that without many years experience in enterprise integration architecture I would not have been able to score the 100% on at least half of the modules. This is beyond the issue that some of the links to the required reading was broken.
As mentioned, Perplexity summaries were really useful in completing this course, as well as some research to fill in the blanks for missing content. For those that are interested, I exported thread I used for the course and have made it available in PDF format as Perplexity_Research_for_Coursera_Build_Intelligent_Agents_n8n_Course.pdf
You can see the Perplexity thread (including the delete query that started me on this journey) here: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/does-n8n-have-the-ability-to-r-23edr0K1SYqlwvRRk7QGOw
© Scott S. Nelson