it's very hard

not very good

outdated

not good

Great material terrible support.

The course material is top notch, the teachers are good the course is concise and on topic and the assessments are well targeted and interesting. So what's my problem? It's the terrible automatic review system and the non-existent educator support.

I using rust for this course as it's a language I like and being low-level it's relatively well suited to this kind of thing. However, rust is a language which heavily embraces external crates (libraries for most other languages) and therefore sometimes crates are needed for even relatively simple things. In this instance I needed a crate to help me sort f64 values (it is possible without the crate but it's quite a faff). I therefore put a message in to asking about how to use external crates as the system doesn't seem to allow it. After a month and two support tickets with Coursera (both times with their representatives contacting the Educators) I have still yet to hear a reply.

Having done a bit of digging, only one of their educators has ever replied to a discussion (he has 708 replies total which is extremely few considering 300,000 people are enrolled and the specialisation has 6 modules) and he has no recent replied.

As an additional point the automatic grader does not appear to be being maintained. In one instance my code failed to compile because it contained the .split_once() function. This function was to the language added in May 2021 meaning that at a minimum the rust compiler they are using is almost two years out of date.

I have just finished inspecting the first course, algorithm toolbox, to get a taste of the whole specialization and to compare other offerings in this e-platform.

I understand this is a difficult topic to teach but this is exactly the whole point of teaching ! Making complex topics simple to learn and digest.

This is my critique of the course in simple terms:

a) Quality of presentation slides; poor

b) Foreign english accent makes it difficult to follow

c) Disconnect between topics, I felt the three main techniques covered in the material were disjointed somehow. E.g. dynamic programming has serious gaps and the whole lessons felt like a big black box that you need to fill up with external resources (youtube, khan academy, google search)

d) mathematical background and terminology / jargon used overly bloated.

Great material, review- but course setup is not efficient. programming assignments are failed with zero useful feedback, so debugging is unnecessarily too time consuming. In practice error messages are more informative. I am all for encouraging independence and not hand holding, but when the grader says "failed test 7/16, unknown signal 11", Just telling students to "test your code more" is not a good use of their time nor an efficient and effective way of teaching.

Don't sign up for this course. The content delivery is poor. The way they designed the course homework is to test your code with many test cases. If your code fails, they don't share it with you what the test case is. You will spend a lot of time wasting to understand what's the problem with your code or algorithm. You can learn way more by spending same amount of time.

Would give a negative star rating and it's too much information to process my brain is overloaded with crap and bs. Hate to say it but I have disability and NO time for stupid wordy instruction OR computer coding issues. Sandbox I ended up HATING!! It's NOT for everybody in my opinion. Leaving this course like heart attack!! What a wasted month into summer!

oh hell. I wish I saw comments before purchasing. DONT LEARN FROM THIS COURSE. I spent double even tripple time watching other videos to understand what they are talking here.

I though I was too stupid to understand, and to solove the assignments. after seeing that it happens to a lot of learners here, I got back a litte portion of my confidence.

The course seemed like it was going to work out well, but, the Kotin code that is included in the lessons doesn't work with stdin locally. The support offered by the course didn't give me any help in figuring out what the issue was. I would have had to have refactored all of the code in the examples in order to complete assignments.

The explanations for examples were hard to understand. Sometimes, there was no clue for your bug to fix and you had to dig up tons of external resources to pass the assignments without any help from mentors, and that made the price of this course ridiculously high.

Very poor instruction explanation. Very BAD support. Literally, respond to my simple question about Tasks in 2-3 weeks after I create the topic. I did finish this course only because I spend money and dedicate myself to finish it. Will never come back again.

I thought this course would be better, since I saw many awesome things in it. But to me, and I've seen for so many other, it gets really tough as the weeks go by. I want to learn, but this simply isn't being helpful to me OR making me learn something.

This is really bad, they offer the solution without explaining the problem really. I stopped after the first week because I thought they'd teach you about it, not offer completed solutions where you don't learn anything

pseudo codes are only written, not explained. Even the lemmas were quite difficult to understand from the video. Assignments are great, but concepts could not be cleared.

Problem statements were not clear. Instruction was not well oriented to problem solving. Not showing the fail cases on programs caused much less efficient learning.

This is the worst course i have ever participated in

when i upload the code you get failed case without knowing the error even though the code works perfectly

The course is designed to people who want to remember, not to learn. Some of the explanations are incorrect and some of the tests are actually wrongly made.

The grading method is not user-friendly at all. I spent more time figuring out how to submit my assignment rather than working on my assignment.

Not happy

Presentation slides are poor. if sometimes presentation are too complex on that time we better to use whiteboard.

Negative Stars; avoid at all costs. Why? The quizzes and programming assignments are janky and vague AF.

Instruction to the programming are hidden in som pdf. Not where they should be. Right next to tester.

Really really bad. Confusing and even doesn't give an brief explaination to those simple concepts.

Too confusing, No Proper Explanation. I didn't no gain anything from this course. Worst course.