I am starting to run into very familiar problems that Udacity courses seem to always fall into. The first is outdated content. Given that Udacity and Google started accepting applications for the Grow with Google Challenge Scholarship months ago, you would think they would have time for one person to walk through the course material and notice that, gee, the current version of Google Chrome Canary looks nothing like the version of Google Chrome Canary in the video. They could then maybe write some notes at the bottom of the video pointing out the differences and how to accomplish in the newest version what you need to accomplish.

The second is a rash of putting the cart before the horse episodes. It was just plain cruel to point out how useful MDN is as a reference immediately after the quiz where you needed to use MDN as a reference. Those references need to be introduced before we need them, not after. They should also be listed as usable links underneath the quiz video/interactive page.

Finally, about those quizzes used as pause buttons. I really dislike having to click a button that says “I just did this really great thing!” when I have done nothing of the sort. Every “quiz” like this needs to have an “I have yet to accomplish this great thing, but I just want to move on anyway” button. I would think Udacity would want to know how many people are just blitzing through the material and don’t really care about actually doing what the quizzes are asking them to do, or how many people get stuck on any one particular quiz and just give up because they really don’t have any other choice.

UPDATE: There is such a button. It says “View Answer” and it is right next to “Submit Answer”. I don’t know how I forgot about it and missed it this time around.