This course was really helpful with my profession

Very informative. Good overview of the basics.

This is a good course. I've learned very much.

Really good and thorough introduction to GIS.

Very welcoming and clear introduction to GIS!

Excellent introduction to GIS and Arcmap.

Great intro to GIS and ESRI products.

Wonderful class! Very informative!

Great Courses, Awesome Teacher.

Its very helpful.. Thanks a lot

Very good introductory course

It's a wonderful course

Very Good Course!

excellent course

Excelente curso

very helpful

great...

ok

As an introductory course, I found Fundamentals of GIS to serve me incredibly well. The material was laid out clearly and the team at UC Davis has put together very easy-to-follow video lectures and practical "lab" activities.

The video lectures were well edited and the instructor's affable and approachable nature emanates from the screen. I found the video content engaging and helpful.

The lab activities are self-directed using a PDF written up by the course instructors. The instructional step-by-step PDFs acted as excellent tutorials for using the primary software covered in this course, ArcGIS.

Though I appreciated the use of forum posts to review material at the conclusion of every section, I didn't find many meaningful discussions occurring in them. I would've appreciated seeing some early forums assignments such as "Share some examples of GIS material use in your favorite region."

Overall, I enjoyed the course and gained knowledge I didn't have previously. I have a basic understanding on the use of ArcGIS to complete basic projects as well as a broader sense of GIS in the world and its uses. Thank you UC Davis!

Nick is an excellent professor. He explains concepts in a straightforward, easy to understand way. It's awesome that we get a year of the student version of ArcMap to play around in. The assignments were helpful and instructions were easy to follow. I'm looking forward to learning more about how to aggregate data and build maps in future courses. I will say though that there were some difficulties on the tech side doing this course. For one, I have a Mac so I had to purchase and install Windows for Mac since ArcMap only runs on Windows. So that took some time and I think ~$150. Second, the link they initially send to you to install ArcMap doesn't come in the right format (It needs to be in a .txt format). My husband (who's a coder) had to help me convert it to the correct format so I could actually install the software I needed. Questions related to technical problems on the discussion boards don't seem to be answered promptly (or sometimes at all). If not for these issues, I'd give the course 5 stars.

The course content was great and I learned a lot! The assignments provided a good introduction to hand-on GIS work, and the lectures explained things in an easy-to-understand way. However, some of the material (e.g., the video about how to get your ArcGIS license) was out of date. There was also an issue with one of the assignments involving a graded external tool that caused a lot of stress for many students (the assignment refused to mark itself as 'complete' even after completing the task, preventing students from completing the course and necessitating a lot of back-and-forth with the Coursera suport team), and the course staff didn't appear to be monitoring the discussion forums to address this issue.

The information within the course was very helpful in my professional growth, but the final project was poorly explained in the rubric. Furthermore, having non-experienced peers grade your project was poorly thought-out. The number of times I had to re-submit the project due to failing a peer review on subjective opinions was infuriating. All versions of my map had all the key elements that the rubric asked for. However, my grade was being subtracted based on "not being artistic enough". I believe an instructor should grade this course to rule out subjective opinions from having an impact on grades.

Nick Santos is a great teacher. I found that the first half of the course was extremely well explained. I found it very easy to follow, and was thankful for the slow yet engaging pace of learning. However, I felt that the course got a bit "rushed" towards the end. Particularly in week 4, there were a few lectures that I did not completely understand. A few things were also a bit unclear in the final assignment, which was stressful considering it was graded. I think this has given me a good range of skills for starting off with GIS. Thank you!

A good introduction to GIS focusing on the fundamental principles with a good practical element included. There is a lot to take in over four weeks so it does require plenty of time to absorb all the required learning and complete the assignment. Plenty of information and resources are provided and the lectures are clear and easily to follow. The only criticism I would have is that there is probably too much emphasis on Arc GIS, it would have been nice to learn some more about open source platforms like QGIS.

Great course but I didn't give it the 5 stars becuase for the 2nd assingment, the Cummulative Area table that was required to complete the assignment was not inlcuded with the data, therefore I could not complete this assignment. It seems like other people had that same issue too. I hope they correct this issue or if this was a mistake in my part, I hope they provide a better explanation of where to get this table so future students don't have to skip this assignment too.