The course must be updated

The Course is outdated

Obsolete, swift 2

Very caotic.

Poor Quality

Very knowledgeable educators.

Course is given in a q&a style which is very very good for a web based course since the questions often are exactly what i want to ask.

However, think the course can still be improved, especially in the following aspects.

(1) examples in the course are not thought through ahead. Instead, educators came up with them on the spot. that way it may not be the best example to convey the message, plus the videos are made unnecessarily long in this way. Think it's good that for a programming course to show real time programming sometimes. But to do this all the time is a bit too much and therefore inefficient. Comparing to some other courses, think this one could really benefit if the educators could give some thought on how to teach, especially to think from a student perspective.

For example: about the capability of overwriting and defining new operators, the example given was to define a knife operator and to overload plus operator to stew vegetables. Both examples do not make much sense to me. Although i did understand that it's nice that one can define his/her own operation/operator, when the examples came I actually got confused -- how do i stew vegetables with code??

(2) Some of the quiz questions I don't find useful. For this course I need lots of time to complete the quiz in contrast to other coursera courses I did. This is because i need to actually read the documentation in order to answer the quiz questions since they are really in depth. In this way, to do the quiz is actually the way to learn. But some questions are quite artificial, for example, there's a multi-choice question about "what are the different ways one can find help..."

(3) Finally, I find the video and the quiz very abstract. that it's very difficult to follow without making a line of code myself... Also it is not clear what the educators expect as a pre-requisite for taking this course. Sometimes things are explained as if the listeners have no programming background at all. some other time, a concept is explained so fast I wonder whether i should have known objective-C in order to follow this course...

I'm dropping this course because it's just SO poorly conceived. Three weeks in, and I can't really articulate what I've actually learned (which leads me to believe that the answer is "not very much"). The major problem is that this course has no clear objective. And I don't mean that the individual lessons don't have objectives - I actually mean that the entire course doesn't know what it wants to be and the instructors seem to have bypassed this critical question. I have a background in Python, and I was under the impression that this course would teach me how to program in Swift (seems like a fairly straightforward goal). But it isn't that at all. If I were to summarize this course (perhaps a little uncharitably, because I'm annoyed at the time I wasted) it would be: some dudes with a computer talk about some cool features of a programming language. I'm fairly baffled by the fact that there was no thought put into which examples might best illustrate the features they were trying to teach. Which-examples-might-best-illustrate-the-feature-I-am-trying-to-teach is pedagogy 101. They would regularly work through examples just to conclude "actually that's a bad example". This is pretty strong evidence that there was no lesson planning involved. There were also no practice exercises, no posting of pieces of illustrative code, and hence, no way to actually get good at programming in Swift (unless it's self directed, in which case - why bother with the formality of taking a course on Coursera?).

This course is poorly designed. What course on a programming language jumps first into how to use the debugger and what went wrong with a program? You are not introducing Swift, you are introducing xcode (and doing a terrible job of it). Also, I have been using xcode and Swift for 8 months now and producing some really good work, but I could only get 3/7 on your quiz because you have written questions with the purpose of tricking people instead of reinforcing or checking knowledge of the content.

When you teach a new application, consider introducing the interface first. Explain what the various areas are, what they are needed for, and how to control them. This orients the user in the application and helps them to find their way around when they are trying to reinforce your teachings later.

The presentation for this course is so unprofessional. It's like a running commentary on a movie instead of an educational presentation. I felt like I was listening to two geeks stuffing around and having a good time, instead of people who are professional teachers!

I'm so incredibly disappointed with this course. Back to the wonderful work of Paul Hegarty from Stanford University on iTunes University and YouTube for me.

University of Toronto - you should really consider what your teaching staff are doing before you unleash them on the world.

I think for somebody who has no prior knowledge in this course will find it difficult to understand. I have taken some introductory courses in swift programming and were much more elaborating than this; for instance, the part "i think" in week 4 were Jack Wu explains closures, functions, enums, structs... in less than 10min, i studied that in around 5 hours atleast in other visual tutorials online. in the last lecture on image processing, the instructor gave 16minutes tutorial on manipulating image pixels and then gave a link to a website to explain everything about ImageProcessing, a much heavier topic than working with pixels, and even it was not in Swift but Objective-C which i have no knowledge in that language and it wasnt stated in the course that it was a prerequisite.

final assignment is quite vague on the requirements needed by the instructor. would have prefered to have more interaction with the instructors on the assignment atleast. Im not the only one complaining about this issue, you can check the discussion in the course. I guess im fortunate that i have already studied those courses from external sources before i started here.

one of the instructors speaks quite fast with alot of anxiety making it quite difficult to understand without repeating the video.

I was very disappointed with this course. I don't think it's actually been designed for someone who wants to learn Swift and Xcode, but rather for people who already have a solid understanding of Swift and object oriented programming but want to build a picture filtering application. Perhaps the stuff I want to learn will be covered later in the series. However, so far I feel like if you wanted to learn swift, you'd be better served going to the Apple forums which is where I had to go anyway to get all my questions answered. Besides that, they're using a 2 year old version of Xcode! I would wait until they've at least updated the course so you're learning something people actually use now. At least that way, you know there's still someone around too. I didn't notice much action from them on the coursera forums either. I think I will need to look elsewhere if I actually want to learn how to develop anything in iOS.

As a professional Instructional Designer, I can attest that this is the poorest-designed course I have ever seen. Regrettably, I paid for the entire specialization up-front, and I cannot get a refund or even a Coursera credit for enrolling in a different specialization.

Be aware that the faculty who is the instructor of record does not participate in the course. The video lectures are poorly done, including errors and misstatements that could have been edited out, but it appears that no one bothered to edit the raw footage before uploading it.

There is not so much instruction as an overview. There are no coding exercises until the final assignment, which is poorly-described and requires the student to self-teach using outside sources.

There are app specializations in Coursera that appear much better-designed. Look elsewhere.

Unfortunately the course is not very well thought out. The lecture videos are poorly organized, concepts are not presented in the proper context and lack sufficient detail/depth, little thought or effort was put into designing the examples in the videos, there are no actual coding exercises until the last week, there are no examples of elegant code, nor thoughtful examples of good vs. bad code, the quizzes contain questions that are poorly worded and ambiguous (and I think some actually have the wrong answers and are contradicted by other online resources). It's very high level, and they hand-wave important concepts. I really don't see how this class can actually teach you to build a robust high-quality app. You're probably better off just reading some of the official documentation online.

Course content: some Swift specific topics are shortly covered in the videos. Overall, the teaching material is very short. In the first week, students basically learn how to start Xcode. Week four contains a 15 minutes video on image processing, that's basically it for the week.

Follow-up readings for week two just provide a link to Apple's iOS Developer site. That's clearly not enough for a course. Students can google for tutorials by themselves.

Project: The projects mentions classes, which are not covered in the course. It was then also my impression from the peer reviews, that some students without prior knowledge were just lost.

There are many great tutorials on the web which offer more insights and give students a much more fundamental knowledge than this course.

First of all I expected something deeper. First of all this courser is less understandable than "The Swift Programming Language" free book from Apple. Before I join the course I have read a few chapters and from my point of view book explains material much much better. The second point – it looks like tutors invent examples during the lesson (on the fly), this is bring a mess. And last thing about this course that tutors commit an gross error during lecture. Please have a look at "Advanced Swift" lecture, I am talking about closures. The teacher said that closure captures the copy of outside variable, but this is completely wrong! Closures capture the variable itself, not the variable value

I'm a professional iOS developer now but I remember a few years ago taking this as my first iOS course and it was a TERRIBLE experience. These clowns literally did not teach a single thing other than messing around with image customization in playground. They will not teach you any basic Swift fundamentals (which they tried to do in 1 video in like 10 minutes which was also terrible). They should be ashamed because the material is very weak and the instructors are not even remotely motivated based on their monotonous tone. Don't waste your time and go to Udemy and take Angela Yu's course instead of this nonsense.

It is a very small introduction to swift, while the last assignment expects you to be rather fluent in programming using swift. A lot of self study using the guides provided by apple and other sources is needed to successfully complete this course.

Furthermore the video's indicate a lack of preparedness on part of the instructors as a lot of sentences are cut of halfway , then started a new with a new goal. All of which makes this course very hard to understand. For free it is passable, but had I payed I would sincerely regret it

Part 2 is better, but still changing thoughts midway in a sentence

This course is a waste of time and money. I'm an experienced programmer, and I thought this would be a good introduction to Swift; it wasn't. The first two weeks were short, introductory programming lessons. Week 3, "Advanced Swift," consisted of one 12-minute video that barely scratches the surface of three separate topics.

Many things that I would consider fundamentals for this type of programming course (classes, for example) were rarely even mentioned, much less taught and demonstrated.

If you want to learn Swift, look elsewhere. Don't waste your time and money on this course.

It is not basic at all, if you are a beginner in programming language, you are not going to get anything but the installation video. It is good for someone who knows at least another programming language, but for somebody who is starting, not at all. They explain in a 6mins video 3 topics which they should explain in 3 separate and dedicated videos, and then they say go for apple developer website and continue learning, so you feel like you learn everything there and not with the course, Thanks! and I hope you guys improve the course in the future and update it to swift 4.

No stars for this course, 3 modules I did, and I think is not a valuable course, gives a bad introduction to the language, there are inconsistencies in the theory and knowledge of the language. The preparation of the course is poor, there is no direction, a lot of errors using playground and the instructors hesitate and doubt all the time during the recording of the screen. That's not good point for the prestigious University of Toronto and Coursera. One star for the review is too much, no preparation, lack of security, bad quality.

The weekly lectures/assignments did little to prepare for the final assignment. They were short and high level without any coding to back them up.

It is possible to blaze through the first four weeks in a couple hours.....and then spend weeks on the final assignment because you will need to learn most of it on your own by looking through api documentation.

To the instructors: If you want to see what a good "intro to language" course looks like, checkout:

https://www.coursera.org/course/programming1

Certainly not a beginners course. You needed to have a good programming knowledge to make any sense of this course. The final assignment asked you to do things you hadn't been taught. As I hadn't done any programming for 20 years, I certainly found this difficult. Fell behind and there isn't really anyone there to help. Almost asked for a refund but decided to try to continue. I'm struggling to motivate myself into the second course. I really hope it's better than the first one.

this was thefirst course i payed for and unfortunately the worst expierience.

lack of content beyond the stuff in the available simple swift tutorials and

from an eduucational pint of view afwully if at all prepared

its as shame that i cannot give this "course" ZERO stars which it deserves!

i should have checked the very negative feedback of the former participants before bying it

i will be much MUCH more alert regarding content on coursera from now on

Although Parham Aarabi is listed as the professor throughout this specialization, it's a bit of a bait-and-switch. Prof Aarabi is an award-winning professor at U of Toronto, but it turns out he knows little about iOS and has Jack Wu teach most of the material. Jack Wu is probably a heck of a developer but he's a terrible instructor.

I previously took the Android Specialization, which was excellent, so I was shocked at how bad this course was.

Sadly, this course is NOT an Introduction to Swift Programming. As a beginner I found this course was not structured and I was confused about the correct steps to take in order to start programming in Swift. No doubt that these guys are knowledgable but they do not plan the course or teach in a linear fashion. Furthermore the sound and video quality is poor and I have decided to quit this course after the first week and a half.

This course is old enough to be removed from the internet! it's required Xcode 7.3.1!!! now we are in 2020 and using Xcode 11.5!

The Peer-graded Assignment evaluation is a very bad way to marks a project that takes the most time and very hard work to accomplish, which required some decent review!

if (these reviews were clear before I enrolled) { I'll never do it!

I'll return something else! }