The edX course on HTML5 is starting again on October 5. It is Part 1 of a two-part series and the second part is scheduled to begin on December 1.

Update: These courses havew been updated and are now part of a Professional Certificate, although you can still enroll in and audit each of them for free, see W3C Front-End Web Developer Professional Certification on edX.

Both 6-week courses will be taught by Michel Buffa, Professor at the University Cote d'Azur, who introduces them in this video .

The goal of the courses, which have been devised in collaboration with experts from the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), is to teach participants how to code with HTML5 in the best way, and increase their skills as Web developers. Pre-requisites for Part 1 are basic knowledge of HTML and some familiarly with CSS and it is recommended that students complete Part 1 before progressing to Part 2.

Update: There is now a new course HTML5 Introduction developed in partnership between W3C and Intel that covers the basics of how to build Web sites using HTML5 and basic CSS. 

In Part 1 students are expected to: 

• Learn the new simplified HTML5 tags
• Play with the audio and video tags
• Draw and animate fun Web graphics
• Discover the newest HTML5 forms features
• Understand why accessibility is important
• Test the basic APIs, such as Web storage and geolocation
• Practice coding techniques thanks to multiple interactive examples

According to the W3C blog there were over 77K enrollees on the first presentation of Part 1. On the whole, students who completed it found it a good experience. One of the many 5-star reviews on edX says:

Excellent attentive instructor, who always kindly responses to each student individually on the discussion forum. He carefully describes every line of code explaining what happens and why. I didn't knew neither HTML nor Java Script before, but thanks to Professor Buffa I'm able to understand :) 

At the other end of the scale another student awarded it 2 stars saying:

I'm actually quite surprised at the positive reviews with such little negative feedback. This is my forth course through edX and it is by far the worst. As the positive reviews indicated the instructors were attentive and the content was an overview HTML5. However, the assessments were terrible. It consisted of nuanced multiple choice question with __no coding__. Completing the "suggested" coding projects in no way helped with answering these assessments as most were esoteric questions from the documentation. I saw through the discussion boards many people felt the same and just dropped the course. I'm just one of those stubborn people that like to finish what I start. This course was little more that what is already provided in the HTML5 documentation.

Other comments from students who are looking forward to Part 2 suggest that they expect it to require more coding. Its course outline states that it will introduce advanced features related to HTML5, such as Web components, advanced multimedia, audio for music and games, and that during it students will create an HTML5 game.

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