Good concepts but poorly organised exercises!

Interesting but material is of poor quality.

some professors did not prepare us well...

The lecture is not that good as expected.

Only superficial architecture overview.

Still quite basic - errors in quizzes

Gives an reasonably good overview

Its good. But can be much better

Not enough exercises

Too general

unequal quality across modules

Very basic, but well written

Good not great...

Mildly useful.

Dvcdgb

Good

.

I’ve completed Course 1: Intro to Big Data. I’m currently on Course 2: Hadoop Platform and Application Framework. I still have the remaining courses to finish and I’m terribly worried that I will not be able to finish them due to lack of programming knowledge.

In the course specialization description, it specifically states, "Previous programming experience is not required! You will be guided through the basics of using Hadoop with MapReduce, Spark, Pig and Hive. By following along with provided code, you will experience how one can perform predictive modeling and leverage graph analytics to model problems." It also says, “Beginner Specialization. No prior experience required.”

It is impossible for me to complete the four assignments, Word count, Joining data, Simple join in Spark and Advanced join in Spark. I have no programming/developer background. There are no videos with screen shots to that walk me through the steps. It's massively confusing to me. Up until now, I've enjoyed the lessons and so far completed Intro to Big Data (loved this course), but Cloudera’s assignments are not doable for me. The forums aren’t useful, due to my lack of programming experience. I just don't understand. I posted a thread on Intro to MapReduce, requesting if UC San Diego provides expert tutoring for a fee, but noone responded.

In addition, unfortunately, Cloudera + all applications is full of never-ending errors, so experience in debugging these issues is essential and this is on top of just trying to learn the material as a first-timer. I'm thoroughly disappointed, as I was really looking forward to learning in this course and assumed because it specifically states that "no programming experience required," that we would be guided with no technical issues to contend with either. I paid for the entire specialization course, in advance as I was certain that I could do well based on the all course/module descriptions.

I hope for a solution, as I would really like to complete the certificate.

Penny Ann Barr

Tasks: step by step the tasks of week 4, was not designed clearly and required a certain knowledge in python language. It is essential to keep in mind that there are different levels of knowledge, by the students, some are beginners, like me - others have an experience of the intermediate and / or advanced.

Thus, it is essential not only to apply theory in the video, but that explain the function of each line and word of command, and to make statements in similar exercises to practice in cloudera environment, prior to the availing tasks notice. Just copy and paste the command line, does not help in learning. You need to understand why and what it is for, together with the completion of similar exercises.

I thought I would learn to practice, but at least in this module, was not what was presented.

I had hard, tried repeatedly perform exercíco of week 4, but without success. And in the forum, students were trying to help each other. There was no teacher or helper to help in this regard. How could not do from the time, I had to extend the course. And after, I could only do after numerous internet searches, as well as countless attempts.

The content was good, the language clear but I was not satisfied with structure. There were several introductions missing, which were crucial for the success in this course. I was barely able to concentrate on the content. Most of my time, I spent on setting up the cloudera VM and Spark within it. I felt left alone with basically all programming assignments, as simple explanations and a go-to guide was missing. In these most important and difficult parts, much of the content was wrong and there was no sufficient guidance and help in the discussion forum as there was complete chaos.There was no clear communication, which knowledge is prerequisite, especially in dealing with consoles and VMs. The information on the Apache framework was too plain to miss these parts out.Recommendation: Check the course and correct the mistakes, for instance ipython is obsolete within cloudera and with jupyter in the python environment anway. Provide sufficient guidance on how VMs and Cloudera work. That's key in this course and you are completely left alone.

Some of the people presenting don't have really good didactic, The assignments are not consistent, some power point slides doesn't have enough information to be used as reference. In this case I would expect to have comments on them.

The programming assignments are frustrating, even with the correct result you have to keep guessing what is the format the auto-correct is expecting. In some assignments casting the value to INT will make the difference and you have to submit a line in others they ask for a line but actually only want a digit.

If I wasn't a programmer I would have probably had even more problems with their grading system. Since I knew my code was right I focused on guessing the format they expected rather then wasting time checking my program which probably many students will end-up doing even when they have the right result.

Homework assignment instructions were poor and discussion forums are not active enough to provide much support. Some of the homework assignments required us to code certain functions that were not covered in course material, especially the code syntax. This made it near impossible for newbies to learn anything and pass. I spent most of my time Googling code syntax and had to teach myself. I am not happy that I paid Coursera money to teach/train me on this material when in the end I ended up teaching myself with the help of Google. I can do that any day for free, which I am close to considering. I have enrolled in multiple Coursera classes and have never had this big of an issue.

There have got to be better ways to teach this material. The lectures were not helpful - the slides did not have enough details and many more pictures or worked out examples were needed to understand the material (and debug assignments). They required python and spark programming - which most of us picked up on the fly thanks to some generous students who shared their know-how. The course materials need a major overhaul so that they can serve as a useful resource. I went to the internet repeatedly to come up to speed for assignments - and no one is out there explaining this material in clear, well-written English. I struggled and finished the course with only a few hours left.

The course left me dissatisfied.

This all specialisation starts to shape as introduction to BigData for shy pythonic data scientists. As experienced Java developer I would like to get much more than brief and shallow overview. In any case, course material is very introductory, short and shallow.

I would like to see more hands-on labs more engaging than simple 2 copypase-like assignments in a week.

Lecture slides are quit primitive, instructors did not tried hard to prepare them.

Moreover, some questions/answers in quizzes are very(!) arguable therefore annoying. I left a few reports and recommend instructors to take them into account.

Worse than course 1 in the specialization. New presenter PhD for many of the lessons who had a difficult time presenting what was on the power points. There is reading the slides, and there is actual teaching where the slides just provide a focus for people trying to follow along. He was of the former sort which is common among where people are either un-prepared, new to presenting, or don't really know the content their explaining. Also - this was again very high level and you'd be better off loading up a Cloudera virtual machine and going through their first 3 tutorials on your own.

Definitely better than the "Introduction to Big Data", but still miles away from what I consider a decent course. What's the point in presenting slides and reading the keywords to students? What's the point in handing out those slides instead of "real" documents (compare the ideas of Garr Reynolds or Nancy Duarte on that issue)? What's the point in testing for simple facts? On the bright side: The hands-on assignments were kind of fun, although I fear some people may get frustrated as some background in programming definitely helps - should be made clear in the syllabus, I think.