This new Professional Certificate Program opens on edX today. It comprises five courses, between 4 and 6 weeks in length with a cost for certification varying from $49 to $129. Many will already be well on their way to gaining this credential as only one of the courses is new.

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edX still offers students the opportunity to audit its courses for free, complete with access to the course materials, activities, tests and forums. All that is missing is the certificate issued to learners who earm a passing grade.

edX introduced its XSeries certification programs back in 2014 as a option for students who wanted a Verified Certificate of Achievement. More recently it has introduced MicroMasters, graduate level courses which:

"provide deep learning in a specific career field and are recognized by employers for their real job relevance"

It enables edX learners who apply to the university offering the MicroMasters certificate to pursue an accelerated Master's degree course if they are accepted. Big Data, Software Development, Cloud Computing, Robotics and Cybersecurity are among the topics of MicroMasters.

The Professional Certificate courses are career oriented and are:

designed by industry leaders and top universities to build and enhance critical professional skills needed to succeed in today's most in-demand fields. 

The Microsoft Professional Program Certificate in Data Science, which we covered when it was introduced last year, was one of the first of these credentials.

While the Front-End Web Developer Professional Certificate, under the auspices of the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium is a new addition to the edX catalog, four of its courses were already on offer and only the JavaScript Introduction in the list below is new.

The course CSS Basics was new last October and in it Microsoft and W3C experts, show you how to take your Web pages from bland to bold with the power of CSS styling. When we reported its introduction we noted it was recommended students were already at least a little familiar with HTML before taking it - which explains why it comes as the third course in the series.

The three HTML courses were covered on I Programmer when new. The first to be introduced, in June 2015 as Learn HTML5 from W3C and taught by Michel Buffa, Professor and researcher at the University of Cote d'Azur and  Marie-Claire Forgue, Head of Training at W3C, is now titled HTML5 Coding Essentials and Best Practices and is the second course in the series. In December 2015 a second part was added to Learn HTML5 from W3C. This course is now HTML Apps and Games: Advanced Techniques and is the final one in the Front End Web Developer certificate. The introductory course, now called HTML5 and CSS Fundamentals, developed by Intel in partnership with W3C was added when edX introduced the HTML 5 from W3C XSeries certificate in April 2016, which has now been withdrawn as it is superseded by this Professional Certificate for which you need to obtain a set of five verified certificates, one for each course.

The new course certificates cost the same as before and are signed by the instructors with the institution's logo.

The new course covers JavaScript and is:

an initiation to JavaScript programming and has been designed to help Web developers have an understanding of the basic concepts of the language

A 5-week course, starting today for the first time, it is slotted in as the fourth of the five courses and has been developed by W3C in conjunction with the University Cote d'Azur. Instructor Michel Buffa sets out to cover:

• How to add/debug JavaScript (JS) code to your website or app
• How to make interactive websites via the DOM API
• How to change the CSS styles of HTML5 elements from JavaScript
• How to deal with HTML5 forms
• Basic graphics and animations using the HTML5 canvas
• How to use the basic concepts of ES2016: arrays, functions, loops, basic objects.

All the courses in the Front-End Web Developer Professional Program are self paced. They all start today, apart from the final advanced course which starts on June 6th. Each is expected to take 5 weeks but you have until May 2018 to upgrade to a verified certificate.  

More Information

Front-End Web Developer Professional Certificate Program on edX

Related Articles

Understand HTML5 With W3C & edX

W3Cx Course Re-opens

HTML5 From W3C X Series

New course on edX: CSS Introduction

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