I found the 6th week of this course to be frustrating. There was a big jump from the lessons to the final 2 tests, and the questions and directions were not well worded, a bit confusing. The biggest issue was that many students had the same questions that were blocking their progress, however there were almost no replies from teachers or staff to give some guidance, tips, etc. Some of these questions were asked over a year ago and the new students had the same questions again, and still no real activity from the teachers in the forums. In past classes that always happened.

This course continued the trend of this specialization where the lectures are full of vague jargon/diagrams and name-dropping of various applications without teaching us practical skills and then quizzing us on whether we listened to the video verbatim as opposed to challenging our minds conceptually. Only the exercises are redeeming in giving some useful, hands-on experience with some applications but then the final project required extensive googling to figure out how to work with pyspark dataframes that weren't taught in the course. Instead this course should have just been full of hands-on teaching of pyspark, mongodb, and python. Also the splunk module was a total tangent/distraction and should be dropped.

instalation for pyspark is not working properly

This course provides a good overview and positioning of relevant big data technologies. In the latter weeks, the hands-on exercises become increasingly challenging, which is a good thing. I have a much better grasp of Apache Spark and its role in big data processing and integration as a result of this course.

My only significant complaint (and why I rated 4 stars vs. 5) is that the setup instructions for the environment needed for the hands-on exercises needs to be updated. I spent 1.5 days (in terms of time I allocate to continued learning) struggling with configuration of the final exercise. The forum was useful. It appears most learners who take this course after June 2018 will run into the same issue. The course administrators should update the instructions so that others won't lose time or, worse, give up on the course because of issues indirectly (at best) related to the learning objectives.

All in all, this is a very good course; and I'd recommend it.

Lecture material and instructions are very limited and confusing. There are so many places that the order of the steps to perform certain tasks are flipped making the students spending several none sense hours. I wish somebody would care and review the material and fix all these issues!!!

As i am not familiar with the VM and its environment, I spent more time struggling with the VM paths, initialization even with the pre command sets than doing the computation of the data.

I have to give this course a low rating, simply because the week 6 assignment "Analysis using Spark" was a terrible experience. All other assignments throughout these course have been great, but the "Analysis using Spark" assignment was poorly constructed. Essentially the assignment could not be completed as prescribed in the instructions. The data required modifying in order to complete the exercise - which I was never able to complete. The goal of the exercise was to use what we learned from the lessons and work with data frames, not deal with and repair broken csv data. This was extremely disappointing!

the content of the cours is good but the cloudera vm not work properly please try the fix these bugs on cloudera vm many things don't work correctly like mogodb an pyspark thank you

I really liked the instructors. They have a really good way of showing the content and are very helpful. However, none of the examples in this whole course will work. The images used in the virtual machines are so old that they cannot be even updated anymore, because the servers changed and/or the linux distribution is not even developed anymore. Coursera has to immediately update this course and all the courses in this specialization! This is not fair with the student. Please, Coursera! I have always supported the work on the the platform. This was a great disappointment.

It was a good course, it could have been better if some examples of Spark were also provided in other Languages like Java, people without having background of python may find it difficult.

The final assignment contained concepts that were not taught in the course: for example, how to remove leading space from a field, how to put 2 words in a tuple, how to filter lines/texts with null, how to deal with country names with more than one word (e.g. United States), etc. The final assignment requirement far more advanced Spark programming skill than what was taught in the rest of the course.

The lectures are so mundane and abstract. I enjoy the hands on portions, but they are so disconnected from the lectures when concepts are to be explained, that they ultimately feel like we're just executing code from the material that we may not fully understand. By the time the quizzes come up, we're expected to put everything together as if we're regularly practicing the methods used in the hands-on portions. Very disappointed.

The course content is good, however, main issue is with the hands on and assignments instructions - they are not completely clear and lack many things.

Rate this Course

My name is Jose Antonio. I am looking for a new Data Scientist career (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseantonio11)

I did this specialization to get new knowledge about Big Data and better understand the technology and your practical applications.

The course was excellent and the classes well taught by teachers.

Congratulations to Coursera team and Instructors.

Regards.

Jose Antonio.

Mainly I have learned the big data structure and the technologies which are used to control the flow of the data. Practical explanation was really good. This course also given basic idea about the machine learning Algorithms which are used in big data processing such as classification, clustering... etc.I really enjoyed the learning journey..:)

I thoroughly enjoyed doing the course, at the end of the course doing the last exercise provided many challenges which are encountered in real time job, the helpful posts from mentors , teaching staff and other fellow students gave me invaluable insight. Would expect more fro Coursera on Apache Spark and NOSQL database courses

This course gave me a clear idea about how such humongous data are collected from various sources and processed in Bigdata platform, also this course covers some very good tools to practice.Also lectures are excellent in explaining concepts.Overall its a very good experience in taking this course.Thank You

wonderful course but information much more condense for beginners for this course is hard because lots of error and even no solution on cloudera community blog. first experience with Mongodb after this course i am able to say that yes i have knowledge how to work with mongo and spark at beginners level.

The last 2 assignments were really challenging. On hindsight, it has provided a holistic view on the use of MongoDB and Spark in ingesting, processing and transforming data. It required real perseverance in researching and trying out "theories". It was enriching and rewarding but not for fainthearted.

I was looking for this type of course of BigData. I have spent hours to read through different blogs and articles. But couldn't get better idea/direction how to start or where to start. This is ideal course for getting started on Big Data. I enjoyed all the slides and hands on very much. Thank you.

Final assessment was very challenging, but was worth it. I wish we had few hands-on exercises earlier on to build upon for this finale. However, it was still a very rewarding experience. Thanks for putting together this wonderful course. Great work! I will surely recommend this course to my peers.

Wow.. I loved it and invite you to try it, not only it is really hands on but you would have a taste of what is Big Data Integration and Processing. Playing with mongodb, postgres,splunk , sparksql, sparkStreaming, Pandas and a lot. Just give it a try and tell me !

I did liked the subjects on this course! but it would be highly appreciated and would bring more potential students to this course if the setup instructions where more clear and right on the issue. Students come with various discipline backgrounds and 100% of us are new to Big Data Tools, so troubleshooting and issue while trying to do a lab or quiz is very stressful and encouraging. Even better PLEASE add a Troubleshooting section on a week's course should you see that many students are stuck with the same or similar issue...PLEASE!

I liked the subject, and I achieved my main goal with this course. So I am globally satisfied.

But last week's assigments were likely above the knowledge acquired through the lessons. It was hard to succeed on it, especially in some steps.

Eg. It doesn't make much sense to spend a long time looking for the correct syntax of the desc function to sort a table in descending order

This course was a lot more challenging, the assignments requires that you have some knowledge with scripting even though the practice runs through some but if you do not have the background it is very challenging. But, don't give up since you have the vm running on your local machine you can continue to practice with the course examples.