This course gives the strong impression that someone shoved the instructor into a closet and had her give a summary of a course she has taught well with student interaction at gunpoint. Occasionally she gets a chance to make a point where her investment in the field and how interesting her experience has been shines through the cracks in the surface we're shown. This makes the quality of the course overall a question of tragedy, as opposed to simply farce: it's demeaning to be offered this, but she deserved better than to be the face of the offering, too.

The subtitles/transcripts are machine-transcribed with no human intervention, which makes completing this course as someone who depends on transcripts for disability reasons insulting: I can't help but have feelings on what it implies about me that the material is treated with the care and quality assurance needed to leave in "unsuccessful data mining task" where the instructor presumably said "a successful". (It's also peppered with "[inaudible]"s and "[NOISE]"s, but hey, at least those are probably obstructing the understanding of the people who listen to the audio, too!)

Videos themselves are unstructured, wandering blocks of 33 to 47 minutes (other UCB courses, which also have transcripts that were seen by a living human at UCB at least once, divide topics into smaller videos for a Coursera-native format, which is much more effective both in delivering the material and in keeping instructors themselves on topic). The worst are the ones where there's the sense that someone specifically forced the instructor to attempt to recap a prerequisite course or three for the Coursera learners, such as the one that mushes up an introduction to data visualization and an overview of statistics to present a kind of sad porridge of classes I've taken and loved--and that UCB offers material for.

This specialization sticks out in the context of the Data Science Masters program especially because the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing in it: the material isn't just low quality, it's as if it's been beamed in absentmindedly by low-fidelity transmission from a universe where the rest of the material doesn't exist. Which makes sense knowing that it's cross-listed from another, earlier program: I thought it might be reused material put together under duress at the beginning of pandemic lockdowns, and this may well also be the case, but it's *definitely* something assembled without care or skill in what's proven to be best practices in online course delivery and no existing structure of an imaginable online program and then wished good luck and launched out into the void. (I don't know what this says about the engineering MS. I hope its core courses measure up and it's just that data mining is an ancillary elective for engineering so it's a perfect storm of reasons to be bottom-shelf knock-off product kind of quality material produced and published.)

I keep coming back to the injustice being done to the instructor: I'm angry on her behalf that *this* is the image of her and her competency being broadcast to the world by UCB, even more than on behalf of the disrespect it's doing to the overall fantastic programs it's listed in. My hope is to wait until I can enroll at UCB to do the interactive material so that I can at least talk to a human about the apparently catastrophically bad assignment design and grading systems--it's not surprising that the moving parts are as bad as their foundation, but the current utter annihilation of my faith in humanity in this vicinity was, for the record, achieved by the lecture material alone. I hate that I have to give this feedback for something so bad I can't imagine its creator willingly made it the way it is.

Coursera and UCB must retire this specialization immediately and recreate the material in a form that's up to their actual standards, does justice to the instructor, doesn't denigrate any student who subjects themself to it by proxy, and isn't humiliatingly inaccessible for something with what allege themselves to be subtitles. I am grieved that the following statement is accurate: calling this a course is a disgrace.

This course was recently updated. I feel it's much better than the prior version. The videos are easier to follow, and the assignments are cleaned up as well.

I encountered several issues that made the course difficult to complete and left me feeling frustrated and unsupported.

Firstly, the lack of support was a major issue. There were no forums or discussion boards where students could ask questions or seek guidance from the instructor or peers. This lack of community made it feel like I was learning in isolation, which was demotivating and made it difficult to stay engaged.

Additionally, the instructions for the assignments were unclear and often left me confused about what was expected of me. This lack of clarity made it difficult to complete the assignments to the best of my ability and left me feeling unsure about whether I had done them correctly.

To make matters worse, the grader system was broken and often did not function correctly. This made it difficult to submit assignments and receive grades, which further added to my frustration.

Lastly, the lack of feedback from the instructor was disappointing. Despite several attempts to reach out, I received little to no feedback on my assignments or questions. This lack of engagement made it feel like the instructor was disinterested in my progress and did not care about my learning experience.

Overall, I would not recommend this course to others due to the lack of support, unclear instructions, broken grader system, and lack of feedback from the instructor.

This is the most poorly taught and administered course I can remember taking, definitely the worst in recent memory. I'm surprised an instructor that has a rating of 1.33/5 is still asked to teach (or provide content, I guess she doesn't really teach the course, just posts videos created a while ago). The programming assignments that you're graded on throughout the course have very little relevance to the content taught throughout: they're more of an intro to basic analysis & visualization using python & jupyter notebooks. The automated grading rubrics are ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE they are nowhere near robust enough for what they're designed, especially when you consider the terrible instructions provided for the assignment. For instance, don't use 'iloc' when using python dataframes(!) because the rubric can't handle it. Seriously?! Something that basic caused points deductions!!! I believe every single programming assignment has at least one function you have to write where the expected output per the docstring is a plot - but don't actually do it, can cause errors. These are just two small examples of many - your method for creating lists, how you treat variables, etc. can all cause errors that will result in losing points even if your code does exactly what's expected. After assignment 1 I posted in the forums, not a single reply. If you have to take this course as part of the MS-DS offered by CU I might try to wait and see if someone new teaches it in the future. If you're not going through the CU program definitely don't waste your time/money on this course, there are much better options out there. I'm genuinely shocked at how bad this course is.

the lectures need to be more in depth and assignments are not explained well

the course need another instructor because she is not well spoken and not fluent enough to teach in english

I'm enrolled in the not-for-credit version of the course.

I asked about a programming assignment that looks defective in the "urgent help" discussion forum a month ago, and still haven't seen a response. So, I'm not entirely sure whether the course is defective or not, but it's pretty silly to put up an "urgent help" forum and then ignore it.

This course has required programming assignments that only give a score as feedback, and that seem to be unclear, incomplete, incorrect or misleading.

The coverage of material in the course also seems excessively basic and superficial.

The coverage of material in the course also seems rather superficial.

Only about 4 hours of lectures, no textbook or supplemental readings of any kind. Assignments had little if anything at all to do with the content of the lectures and much of what was covered in the lectures overlaps with other mandatory courses in the MSDS program. Huge waste of time and money.

Absolutely terrible course! Do not waste your time/money as I did. The material is scattered, confusing, and delivered in a very hard-to-follow format. The assignments are even worse! I am SO disappointed in my first Coursera course :(

Rather weak course, learnt almost nothing. Homework barely exist and unhelpful with final exam preparation.

Most concepts are explained at such a high level they are not useful.

Very Helpful Course

good

I dropped out because the instructors poor speaking abilities detracted from the work. Umm, Umm, Umm, Ok, Ok, Ok every sentence are not a collegiate experience. I have a general understanding already of data science so I think I'm pretty advanced and ready for this material.

The material and quality of lectures are fairly bad. Lower quality than average in CU Boulder

There is little or no correlation between videos and assignments. The videos have begun to feel like a waste of time, just the same thing being said again and again without applying the information - on video - to the expected outcome per the assignments. Please walk-through each concept with python, for example - if that is the expectation. I have completed the basic python course, but the expectation in this class appears to not match the description of what is expected in the outline.

good

k