Too much talking in videos with less examples. The exercises were vague and not enough information was given to solve them

The videos had the wrong emphasis, and were far too long.

More time should have been devoted to the exercises/quizzes.

Rather slow-paced and not maintained anymore. You learn only absolute minimum. There is no good practice hints etc.

Not satisfied. There are better MOOCs for SQL/Data Science out there. I wouldn't recommend it for a SQL beginner.

Great information, however, the site that host the datebase for the quizes is outdated and no longer supported.

The course is good in itself, but answers circulate on the internet, making the certificate not very meaningful.

there is a lot of questions about how the questions were asked, i highly recommend you do see the discussions

Not enough examples were shared.

Certain concepts were explained without telling their underlying basics.

Way too theoretical and almost no practice. This course is the same as reading some slides.

Could have improved on giving some example questions along with already sufficient theory.

There are few examples about every lesson, and may not have examples for some lessons

instructor should do code in parallel there is just story telling

Did not have practices, just video then straight to the test.

Not information was given and it is clearly out of date.

The first course is good, the second is a real mess

Dont recommend it for beginners

The presentation and speaker

Not the best for beginners

Didn't like the teacher.

Not enough Examples

Too hard

Average

It’s not a course of SQL for Data Science as it skips advanced SQL features like triggers or window functions and focus on the basics. I don't know if the other courses in the specialization go more in depth, but this first one only covers the basics of using SQL.

The course is for the most part composed by videos in which the instructor explains a certain topic with slides and provides some examples of already written queries. This is a teaching method I’ve seen in other courses in this platform and I think is one of the worst ways to teach a subject like programming in which the best way a person can learn about it is by practice and more practice. It’s not like the theory isn’t important; it is and if you’re new to a subject, you may need some introductory lessons, but after that, a course needs to keep engaging students and encourage them to practice in every possible manner what they’ve learnt. This course focuses heavily on theory, with little practice to do. Also, this practice is far more difficult in some cases than the explanations shown in the videos.

Scripts for videos are written in a poor manner, and at times it’s evident the instructor is reading a prompter. She is a knowledgeable person but it seems that is hindered by the script she needs to read and that leads to some misspellings and confusing explanations.

The peer-graded assignment is confusing as well because there is an environment for VS Code which doesn’t need to be used in the assignment. I don’t know why is still there if it doesn’t have a function. Also, to answer and write the queries for the assignment, you will need to search in Google or Stack Overflow because, again, the difficulty level is far greater than the explanations provided in the videos.

Breaking down the course, my rating would be:

Instructor: 2/5

Lessons & Materials: 1/5

Learning by doing: 1/5

Virtual Environment: 1/5

Conclusion: Take the course at your own risk, there is much better material online.

There are so many issues with this course. The lectures, while generally clear, are obviously read from a teleprompter, with no slides or real exercises provided. They lack a lot of substance and examples to fully illustrate the content, and have no interactive components. The instructor is clearly extremely capable and knowledgeable, but is unable to convey any of that information due to the structure of the lectures.

The assignments meanwhile are way too difficult compared to the lecture material and severely lacking in feedback, explanation, or clarity. Half of the questions either have blatant errors, confusing wording, or requirements impossible for SQLite. Maybe this was partially my error, but it's not like the course was very helpful. In one of the lectures, on using DATE, the example in the lecture is formatted incorrectly, leading to a lot of trouble when doing the Quiz.

Some questions will ask you about "correlation" or "predicting", which is fine and all, except for the part where SQLite doesn't support many of the fuctions neccessary for such analysis.

I cannot recommend anyone take this course. There are maybe 4 hours of actual content in the entire course (including quizzes and assingments), except it'll take you significantly longer to complete as you sit there confused by the questions. Yes, you'll learn something, but you also could've done the same with a free tutorial somewhere else.

The forums are filled with people confused by the formatting, phrasing, or structure of assessments. Meanwhile, no effort is made by the instructors or UC Davis to correct the many issues here nor answer any of these posts. It's frankly an embarassment for a school like UC Davis to be putting out such low-quality content, even if it is from their extension program.

The course is overall very high in quality and I found it really useful. The teacher explains the concepts really well and the exercises are very good. I really found joy doing the final course assignment. However, I feel that I got tricked into paying one more month of subscription, seconds after I paid for another month, I did receive the course certificate. I submitted the peer graded assignment one week ago. My plan was to continue with the other courses in this specialisation but after my experience with this subscription/payment philosophy, I will not discontinue and look for other online platforms with a better customer experience for me. Thank you nonetheless for the high quality of this course, I am certain many learners find the material extremely helpful, as did I.