Found the assignments were 'very loosely' aligned with the lecture material and had poorly formed problems in places.

Lectures were reasonably good but not quite up to the standard set with other U of W Data Science courses or other University Data Science / Machine Learning courses I have taken.

The emphasis on methods rather than specific tools makes the course more resistant to the continuous changes in technology. The stage is set well, and there are practical implementations. Still, it's disappointing to see that errors from previous rounds have not been corrected.

It was really frustrating that the autograder and assignment instructions didn't match. This course has been around too long for that big of a mistake. The lectures were the redeeming factor. They were interesting and presented the subject matter in a concise way.

the material is too simple. This course is just like a brief introduction, but not a course in college to teach student the real knowledge. I think MOOC course should be the same as a real college course. With the same difficulty and amount of material.

Good content for Data Scientists but video lessons are not sufficient to be able to complete the assignments. It required great deal of own searching and trials and errors to complete the course.

This is a cooked up version from an earlier, more extensive course. Lecture videos now split from 10-14 minutes into lots of 4-6 minute videos. It seems, some assignments are missing, too.

Good information but lectures were poorly produced and unedited and exercise instructions were blatantly incorrect several times.

A couple of comments in the forums were very old and it seemed nobody had been checking the course for a long time.

Long, slow, rambling video. I watched most of it at 1.75x. Slides are kind of a mess and lectures are disorganized.

little touch of everything， it's good intro for non-tech， but way too shallow for a student from tech background

Program instructions could be more specific. Make it clear exactly what format the programs output should be.

The material is good. If you can get past the instructor's mumbling and rapid speaking then you'll be okay.

Assignments were just not that challenging except first one

If you don't know Pythonl, don't take this course.

Interesting but outdated

This course, which sounds promising in title and syllabus, has many glaring deficiencies. In fact, I feel terrible if anyone ponied up $100+ for it. It roughly covers some concepts of data science, but never at scale, and never very clearly. My background is a science Ph.D. with a lot of computational science experience.

The lectures: Clearly poorly planned. Bill Howe has some knowledge about databases, but little skill in communicating it. The organizational structure leaves much to be desired. Much of the lectures are broad-brush and halting, simultaneously being too detailed as times and not broad enough at other times. Technical portions are marked by a number of errors in speaking and on the slides, as well as a lot of hesitation and jargon. It's as if he neither thought about the structure of what he wanted to say or a script of what he might say prior to recoding the session. Phoning in it is an apt description.

The Assignments: The first assignment with Twitter was fun and interesting and gets the course 2 stars instead of one. The lectures prior to this will not prepare you for the assignment though, so might as well just skip them and do it on your own. The SQL assignment followed a set of lectures in which no proper discussion of SQL was ever given. The last assignment on Map-Reduce is acceptable although a number of errors in the homeworks are still uncorrected long after the first offering of this course. The autograder's idea of helpful feedback is similar to "Incorrect value. Try again" Week 4 of this course, which contains a vast amount of information has no exercises at all.

Overall, this class is the polar opposite of a quality online course like Andrew Ng's Machine Learning Course. Do the twitter assignment and skip the rest. Lectures are poor and assignments are well below average. If I were at UW, this is not the kind of course I'd want representing my university in a public setting.

This course is quite outdated. I didn't learn much beyond what I already knew before I started. The Spark courses from edX are way better than these. Hopefully "Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark" from the "École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne" (also from Coursera) is good (I know their Scala courses, which are taught by Martin Odersky, are quite good).

There are very few quizzes between lectures and the assignments are not very challenging.

Many of the videos, specially the ones at the end were extremely rushed over. They serve more as a review if you know the subject, otherwise I don't think most people will get much from them.

The audio isn't very good for most of the lectures, many having an very annoying chirping sound (from when you leave an old flip phone near a computer... "teh-teh-teh teh-teh-teh teh-teh-teh teh-tehhhhhh....". Gosh, I haven't heard this sound in maybe over five years...).

Good focus on ideas vs principles. The focus on relational algebra is a great way to look at data manipulation in general. Unfortunately, relational algebra is explained quite well, but not really applied after that. This could be a great course if it really taught to constantly think in terms of relational algebra.

Okay-ish explanations of databases and hadoop. Not very deep and not always structured, but rather focused on the technology principles instead of the data principles.

I think that this specialisation suffers the same problem most data science/mining/analytics courses suffer: it ignores the non-technical starting point: scientific or business relevance. How does one organise data, get to know completely new data, understand possible value? i.e. how to start a data science project if all there is is unorganised data and the wish to do 'something' with it.

1. The title is misleading since "at scale" led people to think that large scale data processing platform such as spark and nosql databases will be central to the course right from the start

2. The assignments need a lot of improvements. I am not happy with how we're often only required to submit a single number as an answer. The biggest problem is that this way the grader won't be able to give you meaningful feedback / hint of where you might be wrong. A grader that only tells you "your answer is incorrect" does little to help you learn from mistakes.

3. I think assignment 2 can be paced differently - now it feels that we have a bunch of very easy parts (a-g) that is not very interesting, where the last three are significantly harder.

I'll say the same about this class as the rest of the specialization, if you have the skills to complete this course then you don't need to take this course. If you don't have the skills to complete this course, you will not complete this course. The course instruction is at 10000 feet level and the assignments are very challenging and the course will NOT teach you the skills required to complete the assignments.

I recommend the Machine Learning Course (from Bill's colleagues) at University of Washington. That is a course where you get some real instruction and understanding of how to complete assignments (though still very challenging).

This course left me with mixing feelings. I learned some new things, but overall I don't think that I got understanding of base concepts. Week 4 seems to have disproportionately more material than previous weeks, as though authors tried to Although free, this is course is also offered as a part of paid specialization, and I would be really disappointed if I'd spent money on a course like this.

The grader is horrible leaving you with such brief error messages. You never know what is wrong with your code. The forum is not as useful as I expected nor as it is in other Coursera courses. You know, few classmates. The videos provide you with tons of information, but not much of them are well-organized. I often felt tired and confused since these long videos seldom got to the point.

Incredibly outdated (2015), material courses and videos are low quality.

Hands on resources have not been updated in years (scripts use deprecated Twitter APIs using deprecated versions of Python). Students should spend time learning and experimenting, and not patching poorly written and poorly maintained scripts all over the course.

Truly dissapointed.

This course probably deserves 3-4 stars in a better, maintained form, but the entire specialization is not maintained, the lectures have no production values. Basically, it's a money pit that Coursera is keeping up cynically. It's a real shame because the syllabus correctly addresses a gap in most data scientists' skills.

The exercises are fun and challenging. However, the lecture are not related to the exercises and are very hard to follow (I think it's the same thing as Brian's class in Johns Hopkins' data science course) If you are taking Bill Howe's class, just go straight to those exercises and skip lectures.