Core 1: Hardware and Network Troubleshooting
IBM · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by IBM Skills Network Team
Computer ScienceInformation Technology
About the course
More than 1 million IT professionals have built their IT careers on the CompTIA A+ certification (CompTIA). This Core 1 – Hardware and Network Troubleshooting course from IBM comprehensively prepares you for the first of the two exams required to earn this industry certification employers look for. The course is ideal for professionals looking to kickstart their IT career in IT support. You’ll build practical skills to set up, configure, and troubleshoot devices, networks, and systems in today
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (9 votes, 3.0★).
“A lot of the information seems to be very surface level. As far as the Core 1 exam for CompTIA's A+ certification goes, this is good as a primer but the test itself has some very real technical questions regarding things like port numbers, specifications for cables and other hardware, and identification of physical components which this course does not touch on. Still it can be appropriate for a refresh on some basic concepts but this alone is not suitable for tackling the exam.”
Coursera's 4.6 comes from 216 ratings. Of those, 3.2% are 1–2★.
Starisk reads the reviews learners voted most helpful, and weights each by the square root of its votes: a review with 80 upvotes counts about five times one with 2. Unvoted reviews are not skipped out of laziness — by this model they carry no evidence that other students endorsed them.
That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗