Decent course for beginners with a few quirks. Assignments and quizzes are straightforward but don't necessarily test a good depth of knowledge. The auto text to speech is the most annoying of all with many pronunciation errors. Videos refer to links that don't exist in the text a lot of times.

Overall, it's a good course if you need to get your feet wet in data science.

This course is about nuts and bolts of R software, Rstudio interface, Git and Github with a brief inroduction to version control and other prerequisite of building a data science project. The only downside of the course is it uses automated videos which is a bit mechanical sounding.Though it is my personal opinion but that's the the cause of a missing star in my review.

All of the course content is excellent however there are issues with the peer review system. The final project is peer reviewed by only 2 people (per submission) so the mark has a very high amount of variance and so is essentially luck based, which means you have to submit many times until you get a pass mark on it. Other than this there are no problems with the course.

It's all fine and well to just learn and do things by watching youTube and reading internet websites.

But your learning needs some structure, because at the beginning of the process, you don't know what is important and what is not ! I found the course good at helping give me an oversight to the subject, and getting me up and going with the software components needed.

I believe an updated version would be beneficial, as some R packages have now somewhat different functionalities. Furthermore, I would have liked a bit more instructions into how to create a markdown file. Otherwise fairly easy course; not sure what to expect for the rest of the specialization then, although I've read very positive results. Therefore, I will continue.

The material is good, the subject is interesting, the slides are ok, but the audio is suboptimal. In addition, there could be slightly more interaction (I mean the lecturer recording videos with him doing things at git bash, for example). This course is a simple and good preparation for the further courses on the Johns Hopkins Univerity Data Science track at Coursera.

Really great content, but not a fan of automated videos (as of now). If booking a recording hall is a hassle, a background human voice with slides will be a much better option. If I were to complete a course just by reading study material, I could have chosen a Book instead of a MOOC.

Keeping this issue aside, Overall great content for getting started in Data Science.

This is a good introduction to the tools necessary for Data Science. The lectures are comprehensive. Nevertheless, I view online tutorials for Git and GitHub as well as Dr. Leeks book The Elements of Data Analytic Style as being important supplements to the lectures to clarify and amplify the points that Dr. Leek is developing and attempting to impart to the student.

Video-classes are presented by software voices (with an alternative of using only the text/slides provided by developers), which is a little bit annoying and distances the student from a motivating experience of having an actual professor, an example/model figure to be pursued. The content of the course is complete and well explained by the provided material though.

Course content was too great but that robotic voice i know its still in development but that voice always irritated me and made me distracted .Sometimes i got errors even though i followed the course content exactly the same way you did but it is good to correct the errors on myself.Thank you for this awesome course but i hope you come up with a good robotic voice

I appreciated a lot the program regarding the toolbox, many good references and links are included.

I found a little vague the definition of P-value. I can understand that this was included inside an introductory section, however the criticality of this definition shouldn't be neglected. (I posted a specific comment in the forum of week 4)

Thank you

Alessandro Vasta

The parts that actually talk about data science are great. Polly's voice isn't too bad, almost gives everything an "I am MOTHER" feeling.

The parts where Mother...er Polly tells you how to install R Studio and Git should just be left as scripts/written instructions. Far too pedantic.

Great for getting a solid understanding of where the specialization is heading.

A good but brief introduction to a number of useful skills. I learned a lot in a short amount of time but I still have a long way to go. I was somewhat disappointed in the lack of communication with a TA or instructor. The message boards were desolate and could not support any kind of a robust discussion of the conceptual issues involved with data science.

The instructors are great, but I think the content of this course should be embbeded in other module. Despiting being important, the topics covered here are very introductory. I recognizes, though, they are important to align expectation and to put everyone in a minimum ground of knowledge. However, I am not sure if Coursera should charge US$ 29,00 for it.

It's a good course, but it might be a little too introductory for someone who already has some familiarity with programming (although I hadn't used R, I had other experience with a similar language). So for me, I completed this course much more quickly than I anticipated and was really just very eager to move on to the other courses in the specialization.

This should give you a feel of data analytics and help you decide if you should proceed with the entire suite of classes. The course itself is not enough. It needs supporting materials and more practice sessions depending on your experience level with computer science. I enjoyed it and recommend it for people with no background in computer science.

The lectures are meticulously built for learning perspective. But it would be have been more great if it can be delivered by some faculty in this field. Then i could have understood better. Moreover some real time problem should be given to us so that we can analyze the data and get an experience of how this this course is helping us practically.

A limited introduction to R Studio, Github and R Markdown. The "do it all on your own" model of this class worked better than I expected it to. I only had a few points where I thought "There's a defect in this quiz" or "those instructions aren't quite right". How to maintain the quality as it is steadily updated is probably quite a challenge.

This course was a great intro to these concepts and helpful guide to getting things set up and getting used to the MOOC format, as well! A few times it seemed like the slides jumped right in while skipping over a bit of context, but was able to orient myself with some googling and asking friends some basic questions to figure things out.

Overall, wonderful course - but I would request that you change the signature name on the certificate from "John Doe" to a real professor's name. Having John Doe on the certificate makes it feel inane - I would never show this to somebody with whom I was applying for a job, for example. Other than that, loved the course. No issues.

I have decades of experience in the field, and am using this to broaden from SAS to R. Much of this was a review (as I knew some R already), but overall I was pleased with the course. Some of the quiz questions were more trivia than what I would call actual knowledge, but those items were inconsequential. A decent introduction.

Great course. The only gripe I have with it, is that sometimes the same question is asked during the tests after each module. Also, I got a lower grade because only 2 people graded my work and 1 made an error. I did get half of the points as they averaged, but still. This however is with Coursera I imagine. Definitely recommended!

If i could redo this course, I would have taken it simultaneously with the introduction to R course. On it's own it feels like a grab bag of information and it felt like I was delaying getting into the meat of things. That said, the information itself is very important and I found myself referring back to the lecture notes often.

Good introduction to basics. A few improvements are warranted:

Lessons could be reordered in a more logical progression, particularly when it comes to Git.

Gitbash is not easy or intuitive. A more structured approach (e.g. with cheat sheets, command glossaries, structure diagrams, debugging algorithms etc) would help assimilate it.

The course is excelent for people who don't know anything about R, Rstudio, RmarkDown, Git, GiHub and other tools. However, for people who already know a little bit of those technologies, they will find it a little repetitive. Anyhow, the classes are awesome for you to get to learn to use those tools. Congratulations to the team.