No go no fa

t

I recently completed this course. I have taken many other courses on Coursera, and this one is the worst.

When I needed help, I visited the discussion boards, and found that there was no feedback from instructors or mentors who normally respond to posts by other students who are requesting help or information. The only feedback seems to be from a few other interested students taking the course. There were no discussions or answers provided from any instructors or mentors. Most of the posts on the discussion board were outdated, giving the impression that there is no one else is taking the course.

The quizzes ask a student to "Choose all that apply". Most of the questions are in this format. I understand that an auto-grader usually does not give partial credit for partially correct answers, but here lies a huge disadvantage in even taking these quizzes being that a partial answer is marked incorrect, and there is no feedback provided. Instead, a student has to continuously guess until reaching the correct answer. Many of the questions seemed to ask in a way as to "side-rail" the student. Answering the course quizzes based on the course material was apparently not enough. I found that I had to google almost every question to find out what I needed. In turn, I found that I learned more on the subject by reading through tech blogs on the internet, than I did by taking this course.

I found that taking this course forced me to decipher through several inaudible videos whose instructors mumbled off of the bullet points in their slides. The lectures went on and on in detail and explained differences in older versions of software, yet failed to give a general overview on how the software is utilized, and its purpose.

I was registered for the Big Data specialization, and had every intention of taking the next course, but I decided that it would be wiser to learn this material elsewhere.

It is really a shame that such an interesting subject can be portrayed in such a confusing, frustrating, and unenthusiastic manner. I have never given a Coursera course a bad review, but this one deserves it.

Zero-star rating! Very disappointing. This whole specialization is a waste of everyone's time and resources. Very unprofessional slides, the worst delivery I have ever seen, and no knowledge gained in the process. Where is the beautiful math and good examples? I have a feeling the instructors just copied and pasted material from wikipedia and google and made ugly boring slides most of them in bulleted point (why I will never know??) format with bad resolution images and instructors just hand-waving in front of the text. Every lecture is cringe-inducing and makes me want to tear my hair out and cry in frustration and sadness. Where is the real science? Where are machine learning algorithms? The assignments and the quizzes are a big joke and require absolutely no technical skill! The lectures cover too many tools with too much jargon with not enough explanations and it is impossible to learn anything useful. All instructors do is read off the slides. I mean come on, I can read the slides. What is the purpose of the tools? What is the meaning of the formulas? Of different techniques and applications? I want to report this awful soul-crushing mind-numbing specialization so other poor souls do not have to suffer through this.

First of all, many of your provided scripts have errors in them and PySpark didn't work as it should. Secondly, I couldn't copy those scripts from the VM Mozilla Fox because they didn't show. I had to access them through my machine, email each script to myself, access the email through the VM and then copy it from there- it was a waste of time. Thirdly, you assume that your students are good with Python. This shouldn't be the case. You should have a lesson for teaching some python commands that are relevant to the course (assignments too) . OR, you can say that at the course description, that you need to study Python, and make the number of working hours 4-6 instead of 1-2 hours. Fourthly, you have Andrea Zonca's lectures; some of his lectures do not exactly mention the information needed to answer the quizzes, which also were hard to solve. Lastly, I am not sure how this course should prepare me to being a Big Data Specialist. I mostly learned some Python and Shell commands. I would like a course that gives assignments that we might have in our career jobs one day. Counting doesn't seem like an exciting skill to show for a job interview. I hope this helps, thank you.

I'm sorry to have to give it such a low value, but this course appears phoned in.The instructions for the assignments were extremely limited, and it was a struggle to complete them. In addition, the quizzes especially for the final week were not possible without guessing because I did not find the answers in the lectures. Furthermore, we need more material. Just 10 minutes of lectures where things are not explained well and no reading is not enough. We need longer, clearer lectures by lecturers who have passion and get more feedback. This course really needs work if you look at the feedback online you'll see the feedback is consistent. Plus, there is no interaction from the instructors at all. They are not present at all on the discussion boards. This course shows everything you lose by making an online course. Even the software instructions are out of date at times. For example a simple thing like checking if you have the right version number now is out of date. It's not hard to keep this up to date for what must be a cash cow for the university. It's my undergraduate alma matter and I'm frankly embarrassed that this course is the best they can do.

Totally not worth the money, nor the time/bandwidth.

Very vague lectures, droning over the concept 'big data is big' and taken from this blog post:

http://opensource.com/life/14/8/intro-apache-hadoop-big-data

Then 'exercises' which are just 'copy and paste' from existing tutorials, e.g. the Cloudera one. There is literally no added value to that, so charging for this kind of 'service' is ridiculous. I can complete a whole exercise without even reading the code! It could be Chinese!

There is quite an uproar going on in a few forum discussions, btw, about the surprisingly low quality of this specialisation - I'd like to quote a fellow learner here: "This is one of the most amateurish and half-hearted attempts at running a course I have come across in a MOOC."

And now the icing on the cake:

"Scalability at it's core"[sic.] in the FIRST LECTURE? How these people even get a Ph.D.?

(Apologies for the rant and the harsh words - I'm a Coursera lover and early adopter, and my overall opinion about the platform is 6/5 ;) )

This course should serve as a case study of how to fail with online education.

Starting with poorly prepared slides (do they need to look so raw and aesthetically rough?), poor sound and half-quality videos and ending with the flawed and sleep-inducing content and method of delivery, this module is neither instructive nor practical, rather concentrating on discussing about the theory and intestine mechanics of Hadoop without much of a concern to establish a relationship between the theoretical/architectural blah-blah-blah with real-world application and hands-on technical practice.

For the price offered, one is better-off with any other book on the subject and you might discover that it is from books and other online courses that you will actually learn more about Big Data than ending up hating or feeling intimidated by the subject due to this course's failures in content, presentation and method.

This course was more challenging and well explained, there are still some things that I think are missing, in some of the quiz questions, I could not find reference from the slides/presentations, even though we need to self learn this using more material I'd like to get more material like recommended books, online sites (besides the apache technical guides or hortonworks).

Feedback: Most of the learners that did not complete this specialization before the new version was launched are going to hang there not being able to complete the old specialization (2015) because of the Coursera Platform technical limitations. Please, if you plan to take a specialization, try to complete ASAP as apparently if a newer version comes, they won't care about the old version learners.

Thanks,

Saul.

A deception. Very disappointing.

Contents are not elaborated neither prepared. Quizs are an absolutely night mare. No follow up at all by trainers on any of the serious issues having during the training.

I have done many other trainings at Coursera without any concern and with great results. This one should not be included until a minimum quality.

Paying for this training may be considered as a fraud, sure is a deception.

My thoughts about Coursera has crearly change after this certification. Minimum control quality needs to be done before offering a product.

I am sorry, but it is not acceptable at all, and Coursera should not allow such courses within the catalog.

Honestly I would expect money back to all the people who took the training.

The examples made very little sense and it was difficult to understand the underlying data model. This made it difficult to grasp the algorithms used in the map/reduce.

The quizzes etc. always seemed to have questions that were not covered in the lectures or keyed off a single phrase that was buried in the minutia of the presentation.

While I did have a very high level understanding of hadoop after the course, I don't think I really learned anything that I could not have picked up on a 1 or 2 page summary and I don't feel like I could really do anything with map/reduce and hadoop beyond word counting.

I finished the course, but feel it was a waste of time and money.

If I am ranking this course between good,batter,best I may say that it is the worst one.Why? We see that we have weeks on HDFS, HADOOP basics and HADOOP stack but none of this are well described.In HDFS week the professor only say about HDFS but still he don't explain briefly about what exactly rack is?what is data node?how many computer has in a data node?what exactly heart bit is?how job tracker, task tracker work? The community is so week.I ask a question around 4 days ago and I see that my question is viewed by just one time.There is no mentor reply.They don't even see this.Same series course Introduction to Big Data is a nice one I think.

This is a disappointment compared to previous intro to big data. No real efforts made to make the material interesting and comprehensible. You just see slides with a bit of text, commented by a guy who, indeed, seems to know well the subject... But has no pedagogy and fails to convey any interesting idea on this amazing subject. I wouldn't have followed this if it was free, but having paid for it is even more painful. (I tried to wait a bit to see if it would improve and come back to the greatness of the 1st module, and missed the refund deadline, yes, there is one !...) Conclusion : stay away and use your time and money more productively.

Poor quality lectures all around. Touching surfaces only, all the places there is a need to explain the details, the instructor has taken careful efforts to take attention off it. Also, the lectures are funny in a way very evident that the instructor is reading out lines and possibly for the very first time. I am not against reading from somewhere as long as there is quality to material and effort by the instructor to teach. Waste of time. Sad I have to go through as I am set to finish the specialization.

Waste of time. As one of the classmates noted - "using a lot of buzz words" which give no real knowledge at all. Lecturers just read the slides (which are rather meaningless anyways), often make mistakes. Not sure if they have any true experience - as another classmate said: "they learn with us as well". Quizzes are rather "guess the correct answer", and are useless. I have a doctoral degree and took over 200 courses at different schools and from different teachers. This course is the worst so far.

The structure is terrible - there are lectures about the architecture of different software products that are clearly written by people with a strong background in computer science who have not had any beginners watch them. Terms are introduced and never defined, concrete examples are few and far between, and the assignments come with little to no guidance. If I hadn't already had a strong background in programming, I don't think I could have completed this course.

This course is bad, in every possible sense. The video is rambling nonsense. The quizzes are arbitrary. There's no homework, no assignments, no projects, no learning.

The first course in this series shared many of these problems but did include a lesson involving installation of cloudera's VM, which was very useful, however simply installing the VM and going through their tutorial is the most learning you'll get from the first two months of this specialization.

The specialization was very promising until it had started. It doesn't deliver the knowledge promised in the description. Instructors read from slides or read from tutorial descriptions on Cloudera. The course is very unstructured and all definitions are very vague. At the end of each week of the course, you will probably realize that you don't understand the application of most tools mentioned in the videos.

Not worth spending money on it.

I got the feeling that this course is not very well explained/recorded. I thought it was only week one, so I continued and at week 3 I cannot handle it any more. After watching the videos I cannot really get the idea of what is explained or what is going on in Hadoop. Week 4 and 5 are better explained. Moreover, if you do not have a good understanding of Python, do no take this course; else, you wont be able to finish the assignments.

This Course is very unsuitable for total beginners, the instructors use high level terms without actually bothering to explain them. The instructors are not explaining anything except reading out their prepared slides.I can only understand the course as I have some amount of experience at using Hadoop at my previous job. I have taken many courses on Coursera , this is by far the worst course I have taken. I regret paying for this course.

Having to do python scripting without any assistance and incomplete instructions has wasted an inordinate amount of time. Either you need to make python a prerequisite or give step by step instructions without having to interpret the code. This has been so frustrating that I do not think I'll ever use Coursera again. Too bad, because I was really looking forward to learning Hadoop. Now I'll have to find an alternate method to learn it.

This course was too long winded. Also, the exercises were not in-depth enough. It's almost if the programming exercises should have been a warm-up for a more in-depth assignment.

A big item: The assignments were poorly worded and often were WRONG! Please have someone other than the person who wrote the quiz go through it a check for clarity and correctness. I expect more quality from a course that cost $80.

While the first course was promising with acceptable materials, it was under the Coursera standards (I have about 4 years of Coursera MOOC). However, the second course is really under expectation, there is no support for the course (in general case there is a pdf with the video) and the other point, it seems that the creators do not read/seen what the other contributors had done/said.

The course directions were not clear and when i asked questions on the discussion board no one answered. Also it asked me to submit an id but when i tried to submit it took me to another page that had no options for submitting. There is no place to email to ask how to submit my id. Hence it does not work and you cannot ask any questions because there is no one to ask questions to.

Very Bad Design Course!!

I want to do assignment related to mapreduce. It is saying to check first assignment of wordcount in big data course. When I try to recall the concept I learned 2 month back I cannot access that. Finally I am ending with droping this course and specialization. The worst course I attend on coursera. First time disappointed.