The content of the course is ok. The main problem is that the way the information is presented. Ilkay Altintas, who is the main lecturer, is a sweet woman, but lecturing from a manuscript is not her strongest side. It is clear that she is reading from a screen while she is looking into the camera. Anyone could do that job, and they should have chosen more of an "news anchor" type of person with better pronunciation and more flow. It's simply very uninspiring and boring to listen to. Also, 59 dollars is far too expensive for such a short course.

Its was more of theoretical knowledge than application knowledge which is generally required for working professionals.

Practical implementation example are less.

Courser material still refers to the 5.1/5.2 Virtual Box versions which are no longer supported. A link to Virtual Box would have been better than installing locally in system.

Hadoop exercise could have been more , better if divided into smaller tasks with commands usage for better understanding.

It covers theoretical part of "What big data is" and basic info about Hadoop. Quality of presentation slides is below average. Most of them are not readable - many fonts, many colors, some with complicated pictures, some with no information at all. Part with Map reduce is just slightly touched, not explained in details, without examples. Practical tasks from hadoop are very easy and they show nothing (just how to navigate over hadoop file system.

The basic concepts were mentioned but not explained deeply enough, so I was mostly memorizing rather than understanding. The presentation was boring, and the tests did not really test anyone's understanding of the subject matter but rather if one memorized correctly the information from the videos. I would recommend finding a more engaging course.

There is a big learning gap between the first two weeks and the third one. Some key concepts are poorly or never defined throughout the course. By the end of this course, I lack the knowledge to perform a basic big data analysis. The tools we learn how to use during the course are not particularly relevant.

The course instructors are indeed a charm and do a great job. But the practical session are too outdated. Even the company that offers the VirtualMachine image does not offer it anymore. The content on this part comes straight out of 2015 and it shows! It is a pity because the theoretical part is great.

Decent overview of things but the presentations seemed outdated. The material is a bit too basic and could benefit from more practical aspects. It felt like not a lot of effort was put into making the course. I hope the next few courses in the specialization are better :)

No clear guideline of how to use Cloudera proparly. Some functionalities you need to complete the final weren't even mentioned during the lectures! It took me several hours to find useful information about it online.

Tedious exercises through VM where instructions oftentimes do not work out of the box. It is a hassle to download the slides in small sets and their design awful. Definitely one of the worse courses I have taken.

There is a lot of terms that is not needed, the presentation of the course does not inspire to want to know more and is very one tone. If you know a bit about data and some concepts you do not really learn a lot

The material was pretty out-dated and extremely basic. Given the technical nature of the later courses, this material would only be useful for people are incapable of finishing the specialization.

It is old fashioned and much theoretical. Does not mention any details about hive, spark etc. But if you want to learn the history of bigdata its good for it and understand main need.

I have problem at the last hadoop part, which requires a lot of laptop performance and eventually let my laptop went into repair.

Do be careful while sign up for this course.

You can easily get away with skipping the first two weeks of the course. Only the last half the third week seems to contain any real technical information about hadoop.

I guess I shouldn't be pissed at an 'Introduction' course to be too basic, but still... It's completely skippable, even if you don't know anything about big data.

This is more focused on theory than practical experience.Its better to shorten the video duration so that it will not be boring to listen to lectures.

The introduction is too theoretical and the practice starts too late. The last assignment is actually where I truly felt I started learning Big Data.

Worst introduction. The Instructors are very promising don't get me wrong. The structure of the course and the presentation and editing is awful.

Content is outdated. Especially the hands on work given towards the end of the course, It was not self-explanatory

There should be more hands on experience in the first classes, so the pupils have something to tie the knowledge.

Would have been fine as a 1 week introduction to the material but as a stand alone course was insufficient.

Most of the course is providing useless statistics, i didn't enjoy it and it's a really basic course.

A very basic and still confusing set of slides. It's much more productive to google Hadoop wiki.

Some very basic information, minimal hands-on work, and very picky tests/quizzes

content boring. slide not attractive enough to attract beginner to learn.