The IBM tools are so unfriendly to new users

Last few lessons are not clearly explained.

There are so much errors in notebooks!

I had difficulties wih IBM platform.

The voice-over makes me wanna sleep.

DB2 console is so difficult to use

The Lab env sometimes has trouble.

Expected more from an IBM course.

needed to update many topics

hard to use sql server

not well designed

very simple

Hi,

I completed entire program and received the Professional Certificate. On the Coursera link of my certificate "3 weeks of study, 2-3 hours/week average per course" is written. This information is not correct at all, it takes approximately 3 times of that time on average! I informed Coursera about it but no correction was made. It should be corrected with "it takes approximately 19 hours study per course" or "Approx. 10 months to complete Suggested 4 hours/week for the Professional Certificate".

Here is the approximate duration for each course can be found one by one clicking the webpages of the courses in the professional certificate webpage: (*)

Course 1: approximately 9 hours to complete

Course 2: approximately 16 hours to complete

Course 3: approximately 9 hours to complete

Course 4: approximately 22 hours to complete

Course 5: approximately 14 hours to complete

Course 6: approximately 16 hours to complete

Course 7: approximately 16 hours to complete

Course 8: approximately 20 hours to complete

Course 9: approximately 47 hours to complete

This makes in total approximately 169 hours to complete the Professional Certificate. As there are 9 courses, each course takes approximately 19 hours (=169/9) to complete.

(*): https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/ibm-data-science?utm_source=gg&utm_medium=sem&campaignid=1876641588&utm_content=10-IBM-Data-Science-US&adgroupid=70740725700&device=c&keyword=ibm%20data%20science%20professional%20certificate%20coursera&matchtype=b&network=g&devicemodel=&adpostion=&creativeid=347453133242&hide_mobile_promo&gclid=Cj0KCQjw0Mb3BRCaARIsAPSNGpWPrZDik6-Ne30To7vg20jGReHOKi4AbvstRfSbFxqA-6ZMrPn1gDAaAiMGEALw_wcB

Using sql magic is not a portable skill to workplace applications, so instruction and evaluation using it just means I'll have to relearn this topic with an IDE-agnostic method later.

Moreover, the db2 ibm connection library uses outdated python libraries - it fails unless you use the specific libraries that are supported - and these libraries are incompatible with the latest version of jupyterLab. The supported version of JupyterLab is never mentioned, so you can only use the online environment, and not recreate work on your local machine. This seriously damages the usefulness of the course materials. In addition, this course has many bugs and hasn't been updated. The most aggregious bug is not providing the chicago crime database script (until you reach module 6), as db2 Lite cannot parse a 7 million row CSV. In addition, none of the csv upload services worked properly - they had page faults, parsing bugs, warnings with no inserts, and mismatched datatypes all over the place. I ended up entering them all using hand-written sql-scripts, which is just busy work and not learning.

I would not recommend this course to anyone. They would do better reading a book on python database connections that is current, uses an IDE that you might use in a work setting (pycharm, sublime, notepad++), and doesn't omit the specific library version arrangements required to make the exercises work on any machine.

This was awful!

The main issue with this course is the tools that we have to use in order to complete assignments. Learning and understanding SQL was the simple part. What I struggled with most was using IBM's DB2. This course needs to be updated and explained thoroughly because the way I struggled with just trying to get the systems to work was unnecessary. I never been so frustrated over an assignment before and this left me very discouraged. If there are any fellow students that are reading this you will need a lot of patience with this course ad if this reaches any professors ir people in charge of this course I hope that you look into this issue immediately and update the course to make the instructions clearer and more concise.

Most of the courses in the IBM data analysis certificate are annoying, but this one takes the fucking cake. i spent most of my time in this course trying to get their external tools to load and/or work properly. the videos suffer, as usual, from an apparent complete failure to proofread. the hands-on labs have the same problem. i never set up a connection with a db2 database on IBM because no one responded to the support case i opened on instruction from an otherwise deeply obfuscating error message. i waited a week for support when i should have been studying. i dunno if IBM is really in the business of developing skills, 'cause they seem to be merely in the business of pissing me the fuck off

Most of the labs are not working. Literally more than 50%. If you dont believe me, just open the forum. People on forum write about problems and bugs which are not fixed for more than over a year after response. That's crazy to imagine that such a company as IBM has such a poor working team.

The initial material is okay, but sometimes they dont even use the knowledge they provide in educatioanl videos in this course, asking you to finish labs in an old fashion way, that's never used in a real world. That sounds unbelievale, but it's true.

At this point i am thinking of refund, but taking in account the time and dedication spent, i choose to finish this certification.

Some of the labs are EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING and poorly wrritten. Even after following the instructions explicitly, I kept running into errors and problems (ESPECIALLY FOR THE Final Assignment where we had to link the database with the Jupyter notebook using the credentials on the previous lab) and doing the followup analysis. After multiple hours of trying to troubleshoot this issue and contacting support, I got nowhere! I ended up having to do the SQL coding on the DB2 page to submit my results. The authors seriously need to reconsider the presentation and quality of this lab. DIFFICULT LAB!!! Especially for week 3. TREAD LIGHTLY!!!!

Lab are the most frustrating. these are the place from where we as student get hands on experience but these instruction and IBM software platform doesn't work smoothly. We had to work on IBM based software platform such as IBN database(Ibm db2), Watson studio. I had issue in ibm bd2 software platforms loading tables and creating new credentials and could not fix that issue for several days finally gave up IBM Data Science course in "Databases and SQL for Data Science with Python". Not recommended, hope you don't get frustrated at the middle of the course

there have been numerous fail attempts to connect to Jupiter notebook to work on the assignments from me and from other peers that I can see in the discussion forum. everyone has their own technical issues which we should not have from the first place, then we have to figure out to fix ourselves based on some vague instructions from your staffs, nothing helped me unfortunately. the level of frustration exceeds the value of the course so I have to leave. Honestly please do not put up more poorly designed course like this.

Most awful, low-quality content that I've personally experienced. In one of the quizzes, there's a question that asks the student to write a query that expresses an age in the form of YYYY-MM-DD. One of the students has asked in the discussion forums for clarification and seems to be confused about the question but a staff member seems to think that the question is valid. Does Coursera bother to spot check the content and quizzes to ensure at least a minimum standard of quality/clarity/accuracy?

The educators for this unit are pathetic. They are more concerned with making sure they have replied to questions in the discussion than actually giving correct and useful information. They repeated don't read the troubleshooting that students have already done, and provide the same instructions giving in the course that clearly weren't helpful in the first place. I spent hours troubleshooting the problems I faced myself because as the "help" the educators offered was inadequate!!!!!!!!!

Regret taking this course. The course is about promoting their IBM cloud database. I had issues (IBM server problem) and I couldn't complete most of the assignments and Final assignment. Reached out for help and no help was offered even after I reached out multiple times. I also reached out to IBM support, no help from them either. Do not take this course. I had to complete it (with minimum passing grade) because this was one of the courses in a Specialization that I am working on.

Waste of time if I can't use the resources you prefer.

On two occassions, separated by at least two weeks, I attempted to obtain an IBM Cloud account. On both occasions the IBM sign up process errored out with:

Of course this error doesn't occur til well after their attempts to collect some PII.

With some of the other problems I've experienced in other Coursera classes I have to wonder if Coursera is trying to become the next Udemy.

Content wise this course is fine.

The problem is the use of IBM cloud. If your free trial runs out the course offers a coupon for more time. However this coupon is no longer offered. You can't access IBM cloud and then you can't complete the course.

It took me several, emotional hours trying to fix it before I contacted coursera customer service to help me. The organisers of the actual course from IBM were very unhelpful/didn't care.