A mixed bag, mostly because of the very poor programing assignments due to very poor task descriptions and monosyllabic answers from tutors when asking in the discussion forums. Wondering what could be the precise meaning of the exercises leads to hours of trial, error and frustration.

Besides this the content of the course is good to understand and execute data cleaning and prepare real world data from various sources for further processing like ML. Pandas is at the center here.

I wanted to take more courses from the Michigan Python series but I will not do this due to the issues mentioned.

I came to this course after finishing the 5-course series by "Dr Chuck" Python for Everybody and with no other Python or much else programming experience. It sounded that this is the optimal course to build on the Python for Eevrybody sequence. But it is a huge jump in difficulty, and for a learner like me the lectures way way too fast, and included a lot of specialised programming terms. Also the assignments are hard and often not very well formulated. I am not saying that this course can't be done when just coming out of the Python-for-Everybody series, but it is very demanding.

I believe that this course is one of that courses that make you realize what you are stepping into, My expectations were hurt because i thought that Data Science was more math involved and had awesome statistics involved, oh boy was i wrong. The course majorly deals with data cleansing and copying a lot of code from stack overflow. if your python is not good please don't take this course otherwise you will get frustrated. If you have planning on taking this course be prepared to be grilled this course will require perseverance.

And most importantly the lectures ,they don't help!

The instructor is warm and seems pretty interested.

Content is way too minimal though and it's not enough to prepare the student for the assessments.

A lot of searching is required in order to arrive at the solution which more often than not is not the most optimum one. Forums are only supported by fellow students and staff's involvement is next to zero in there. Even threads that deal with clarifying questions were not answered by the staff.

I understand that this way enforces community building and helping fellow students, but staff's participation would be highly appreciated.

The material felt very brief. Felt like this was suppose to be a refresher course. The lecture videos are not very helpful in its delivery. I wished there were more visual aids to help me understand the lectures more. Most of the time, it's just the lecturer sitting there talking and some quick screens of the Jupyter codes. I walked away with a brief overall idea of the material instead of an in-depth understanding of the concept. The assignments were challenging and I felt like they were very helpful. Expect to spend a LOT of time researching for the assignments.

This course was challenging taking into account that I don't have a lot of experience in phyton. I'm not going to lie, i would have prefer that the videos and the lectures give us more tools to solve the challenging assigments. I have to confess, I spent a lot of hours solving these assigmments, firstly, they are not easy and secondly, the auto-grader doesn't give you a real feedback on which you can work to fix the code. The way I see things, the autograder needs to improve and the content of the course will be better if it is more related with the assigmments.

I learned a lot through this course, in particular searching the docs and skimming stackoverflow. It was very helpful. I do hope though, that the grader and materials will be updated in the future.

It caused me annoyance to battle with grader. It was not grading properly what in my offline jupyther-notebook runs just fine. I hope that this part of UX, or better - SX (student experience) will be mastered, so that students would concentrate on learning and not on trying to submit the assignment to the obsolete grader. Please, do solve this problem. It matters.

Course material is good esp. the assignments force you to learn a lot more. However, the instruction is not comprehensive. A few assignments were also ambiguous. The support forum is quite good but it would have been much better 1) if instructors would cover key topics a bit more in detail, 2) Easy to find auto grader scripts so one can understand the error or provide a better feedback mechanism from autograder. I had a spelling error in the answer and it took me 4 hours to correct it. Once I had the autograder code, the bug was very easy to catch.

I am somewhat satisfied as I did learn some python skills. I paid for this course because I wanted an efficient way to learn python programming. The far cheaper alternative is to get a python book and work through it yourself. I thought this would be a more time efficient alternative to self study. It is somewhat more time efficient. The questions in the assignments are not clear, this results in you spending a lot of time not learning python but figuring out the semantics of the question. There should be a knowledge check at the end of each week.

I found this course useful since I had no previous experience of Pandas or the statistical features of Python. I have programming experience and feel I would have found it quite a challenge otherwise, but not prohibitively so. Chris is great at explaining things in an accessible manner, and I'm very much looking forward to going into more detail in the rest of the specialisation. I would have enjoyed a little more focus on statistics etc and a little less on the mechanics of the library, but understand why it had to be approached this way.

For future tech or CS courses from U Mich, please follow Dr Charles Severance's approach in teaching. Make learning and wanting to learn truly enjoyable. Teach material that will be tested in assignments and not throw curve balls which lead students to google answers and 'stack overflow' it unnecessarily.

This course is not for beginners or for those that have just picked up programming.

The autograder system is a real pain in the butt. A lot of time is wasted just to conform and present the answer that the autograder will accept.

Great course material. Grading issues due to Python versions was a pain. The discussion forum may have been more helpful with smaller groups (18k posts in a given week is overwhelming!) Nice to have access to the larger group brain, but I bet having chats with cohorts of 10-100 people would make the course feel more intimate and engaging. Also, the pace of lectures felt like the prof was reading text off a screen rather than a "real" lecture with natural pauses, which made it difficult to follow along with code as the prof was speaking.

This is course is classified as intermediate and a 10h commitment per week. For me this was an under estimation. It took me much longer. The problem with the course for me was, that the skills required for the assignments were not taught during the lectures and the assignments are poorly described. I ended up googling for hours. The links in the forums are very helpful, but I usually prefer to solve assignments on my own, which was not not possible for me in this course. I did learn a lot, but this was very unefficient.

Honestly, my opinion is that the material is "a little too difficult a little too early" .. not because an experienced programmers can't handle it, but because the urgency of getting the final assignment done forces a reversion back to more traditional programming techniques rather than instilling "Pandas like" programming techniques ... if anything .. "instructor solutions" should be given at the end of the course so we can go back and see "how we could have done it more elegantly" in the areas were are interested in.

Not a bad course but would like to see more teaching of best practice solutions to some of the test and assignment questions. As most of the assignments require a lot of self-learning it would be nice to discover if our solutions are optimal or not. As it stands you can get a perfect score by writing for loops or other inefficient solution when there are quite possibly built-in pandas functions which could achieve the same thing more efficiently. Would like to learn more about pandas and best-practice techniques.

The course materials is very practical. The lectures are very clear and self-contained. The only reason I gave 3 stars is that the homework takes too much time. I spent a lot of time digging into online forums to find out the nuts and bolts to finish the projects. Fortunately the teaching staffs are very helpful. The time spent for homework is too much for my preference. Maybe this is the way to learn this type of information. I don't know. Having said that, the materials and lecture qualities are great.

I liked that the course was very assignment-oriented. It had a good structure and interesting additional readings. However, for people who are not familiar with pandas library it may be very challenging to pass assignments. This minimal guidance, I believe, results not in a better understanding, but in confused students writing bad code and spending hours not understanding online documentation. Overall, I really liked the idea and content of the course, but not how instructors approached the self-learning part.

I have two general comments:

The first comment is . . . there was too wide a gap between the lecture content and the assignments. The second comment I have is . . . I spent too much time trying to figure out what the autograder wanted and not enough time learning Data Science with Python. I can only imagine the work that it takes to develop and launch a course like this. In all, I'm very excited to be part of this program. My comments are critical but hopefully helpful and all your work is appreciated.

Course content was generally good although sometimes the lecturer brushes over topics that could do with more explanation. He may explain 10 things you can do in quick succession making it hard to remember all of the points. Exercises were good but there is a big jump on week 3 and 4 and relies on students to spend time themselves searching the web for solutions to the problems. Whilst it is good to be independent, asking for things that haven't been taught in the class can be hard for some.

This course teaches some useful techniques, but suffers greatly in it's ability to teach you those things. The hw's do not contain enough information, and submission errors are very vague in terms of explaining what is actually wrong. During lectures, too much time is spent on the presenters face. They have presentation slides and code examples that do not get enough video time. It is not at all useful to talk about techniques without giving any textual info about it. It's not easy to follow

It was a good course where i learned about new and great tools and techniques. I learned how to approach the data science problems using Pandas and Numpy. This would not serve as a great course for into to data science. Background with Database Management and Python really helps. Overall i learn about new and great tools and would definitely require Documentation while using the skills i learnt in this course. Overall Great Job by Professor Brooks. Would love to take more courses by him.

I have reasonable amount of experience in data analysis using R. I found this course to be fun and challenging. But I heavily relied on my previous experience. I imagine it would be very difficult for someone with just basic Python skills. Also, it feels like a large chunk of assignments was about data cleaning (yes, it’s important) while important pandas concepts weren’t covered in as much detail as I would’ve liked. The recommended book is really good, I’m using it as reference a lot.

I enjoyed and found all of the lectures helpful, but lack of feedback after submitting assignments was a real problem, especially for the last assignment. A simple response of "this was answered incorrectly, points not awarded" isn't very constructive and was often frustrating. Bugs in being able to submit the assignment were also frustrating. I spent a good amount of time trying to fix my code, thinking it was incorrect, when in actuality the online submission was just not working.

Course was good and i have learned and starting to refining my skills because of this course.

We have to do lot of practice and net browser to work on the assignment and only think that lacks in this course is the study material in the form of video i think,if the content of the video increased then this will be the perfect course plus there should be two assignment one related to what you have studied during video content and the programming assignment which test your skill test.

I have mixed feelings.

1) the course is very interesting. It is an applied course, there is a lot to learn.

2) But very hard too. There are so many things, that you may have difficulties to memorize quickly through practices. Then, you end up roaming on stack overflow and pandas documentation because you just can memorize enough to process and have to rely heavily on the documentation.

If you are interested to dig into the python, this is very interesting (but quite hard)