The first 2 weeks have too many videos, which make it difficult to follow. This breaks the flow of the lectures and makes a lot of unuseful repetitions.

The slides only have words and are hard to follow, no graphs or illustrations, this means that you rely on the voice of the lecturer to guide you, which is difficult sometimes.

Furthermore, the code presented is not run 'live', and results are often lacking, which makes comparison with 'my own results' hard to do.

Summary: Not that its a bad course (SWIRL is a great tool), just look for another course that's easier to follow.

The course is unfortunately very old (2012) without much revision, the gap between the content and the exams is too big and there is hardly any didactic concept.

I would accept such a course from a freshman ta at a mediocre college but this lacks depth an explaining. Its still doable but leaving the students with a mess to cleanup instead of a path of learning is poor. This especially bitter when you start with the first course and its premise to be updated and improved regularly. I urge all people involved to redo this course - 9 years is a lifetime in programming!!!

This course had all the required content for learning to program in R. However, the presentations were hard to understand. There was a lot of information jumps that were more than an intermediate level. I feel these instructors were very knowledgeable, but didn't know how to teach. They need to understand that when you teach a person to read "cat" you start with the sounds "c" "a" "t" and slowly put the sounds together.... You don't just say cat says "cat".

My previous experience in R & my R "hacker mentality" are the only thing that got me through this course.

The lectures are not very helpful to answer the assignments, they are similar to the help files and provide little practical examples and guidance. As a result you have to learn a lot yourself when doing the assignments, and have no way of knowing if you are coding efficiently/ sensibly. I completed the Python course by Chris Brooks at the University of Michigan before this course, and that was a great example of how to integrate lectures and assignments to test learning. This course might benefit from an overhaul along those lines.

The instructor explained functions to use in R, but did not do a good job of demonstrating how to properly use them in conjunction as the course progressed. The programming assignments had almost nothing to do with what was taught in the course. As a person with beginner experience with R, this course required more advanced knowledge for coding in R to complete the programming assignments. I was very disappointed with the instruction though I managed to get myself through the assignments with the use of google and R help prompts.

Huge difference between the concepts taught and the quizzes/assignments give. NOT for a beginner level coder. This course is good for those who already have apt knowledge of coding and minimum 1 year of coding experience. Would absolutely NOT recommend this course for those learning how to code. Better to first learn Python and then do this R programming course. The ONLY THING GOOD about this course is the SWIRL package, which really teaches the foundation for coding in R, hence the 2 stars, otherwise I was going to give just one.

It feels like this course was abandoned by the instructors. The Programming Assignments are practically impossible to be done unless you have previous programming experience. Other than swirl, it would be very helpful if there were basic optional exercises for those who have never programmed before. I worked hard to be able to follow it, but if I knew how uninvolved the instructors were, I would have saved my money and spent it on a course with active involvement from those who developed it. Disappointing.

Huge gap between the course materiel and programming assignments. Swirl is nice but doesn't cover what is needed in order to complete the programming assignments given.

Countless errors in the book we should read throughout the course.

The instructor should focus more on his presentation skills: too many blank seconds and "uuhhh" moments in the videos and the videos aren't in the same order as the book.

JHU and Coursera should review, change and upgrade this course if they do not want to lose credibility.

The way of talking in the videos is erratic. It looks like he is always in doubt of what to say. His speech is full of "eeer" and non-completed words. I don't mean to be a fusspot, but when English is not your mother tongue, this is key to stay engaged. A script to read would probably solve most of these issues. He seems to have a great understanding of the topics he is explaining, however, not being able to communicate it properly results in a bit of a failure for me. I'll maybe try again in the future.

Although the content that is covered is presented in a clear, logical manner, the expectations for completing and passing coursework/assignments/tests that require knowledge that is:

1) Not included in the training materials/presentations

2) Extremely more advanced than a "beginner" level (which is how the course is described)

Trying to pass the Week 2 assignment and quiz has consumed an exorbitant and unnecessary amount of time; I am going to seek training in R Programming offered by another instructor.

This course is *NOT* for beginners. I would not have asked my work to pay for the specialization if I knew it would take me 3 months to complete R Programming. I have a degree in economics, magna cum laude, so clearly I'm not dumb. Also, I have non-trivial experience with Stata. When I read that this would be a suitable introduction for anyone, I had no idea that what it would really take was a professional programmer (which I am lucky to have as a partner) to fill in the gaps.

Extremely misleading.

The lectures and swirl assignments are great for the programming level, however there is a HUGE disconnect between the level at which the course is taught and the programming assignments that are given for the course. I am all for a challenge, but I believe that the tools necessary to think through and apply to the programming assignments are not provided in a good manner. I think there needs to be more practice that bridge that gap between the swirl assignments and the programming assignments.

As many people say in the review sections here: I doubt that a person without any coding experience can master this course. The assignments are hard and oftentimes have little to do with the week's lecture videos. In many cases, the functions needed to successfully complete the assignments are not taught in the lecture videos, while the functions taught in the lectures are not used in the assignments.

I would not recommend this class to someone without programming background.

The content and the speed that they teach you R are actually good. But considering that we now have to pay 45€/49$ for the course you will expect more polished videos and quizzes. Some of the videos are just stutters, repetitions and filling words. It's seems like they have been in a rush without decent preparation. Also one of the quiz questions was simply wrong. This should be fixed. Furthermore some of the commands they present are deprecated and cannot be used anymore.

This course is a little too deep into programming and a little light on learning the basics of R. I would recommend splitting out the more advanced programming concepts in this course and offering them in a course near the end of the specialization.

This course should be higher level and give the user a wider view of R. Currently this course seems to assume significant knowledge of R or programming in general, making it not a good early course in the specialization.

Good intention but the programming assignments were much much harder than what was covered in the mostly theoretical lectures and the more practical but not as advanced swirl exercises. After reading other reviews of this course, and struggling to complete the FIRST programming assignment, I canceled. Please do not advertise this as for beginners - I think people who have had some programming experience before would find this great, but not for the newbie.

The videos aren't narrated by a robotic voice-over, which is good! Unfortunately, they are very simplistic and not actually that helpful at teaching R functions. The swirl package they have you use is actually a much better way to cover the source material, and I advise doing all the exercises. Unfortunately the programming assignments are very random and don't really apply what you have just been taught, so all in all I do not recommend this course.

This is NOT a step-wise introduction to R for the novice. Useful in many respects, but the uninitiated to the field need more time, slow increments in project difficulty and more thorough, step by step explanations. I think the designers of the course wrongly assume that ALL R programming should be taught in THIS course which is erroneous; it should be about laying the foundations, on which the student can then expand his/her R programming abilities.

I found this course to be very poorly structured. Although the lecture material was interesting and engaging, very simple examples, functions and codes were presented in lectures and the assignments were completely at a different level. I spent hours researching online to be able to complete assignments. This should not be the case for an introductory course and I do have programming experience, although not in R. Very disappointing and frustrating.

I found that material presented in the course initially seemed useful. However, the programming assignments go far beyond what was presented in the learning modules and optional practices. I recognize that additional research is common in coding projects, but I found this major feature of the course to be unnecessarily painful and ultimately unhelpful. Only do this course if you absolutely have to. I believe there are better ways to learn R.

The course is interesting, but is very focused on informatics and programming codes, it is not recommended for beginners. If you are looking for a course on statistical programming in R it is not this course. It is a good idea to give the manual for free, although some lessons are tedious and long. It also requires some previous handling of GitHub to complete it, for those of us who are not familiar with the environment is really complicated.

Do not attempt this course unless you have a strong foundation of programming.

Although the lectures and initial quiz sections are straightforward and step by step, once you get to the assignments, there is a massive leap where concepts and commands that have not been introduced in the lectures are required.

There is also no support or way of getting guidance apart from a blanket google search.

This is hugely dispiriting and demotivating.

I learned a lot from the course. The reason I only give it two stars is that the programming assignments are close to impossible for someone with no prior experience. I expected to be able to complete them since the data specialization indicated that beginners should be able to complete the courses. Overall, I learned a lot, but the programming assignments were a very frustrating experience that did not add to the value of the course.

I passed this course with score 95% finished all quizzes, Programming assignments and swirl exercises. but it wasn't useful that much. the videos wasn't interactive, to much theoretical parts...less practical you can't solve the assignments depending on the tutorials you have to google for the answers and know how people can solve the problems.......I recommend if there will be a new version to put these points in consideration

This is a tougher class than advertised. I essentially had to clear my entire week's plans to complete the first week's assignment, which was by far the toughest. There needs to be more testing on a variety of incoming skill sets. The lectures can also benefit from a recalibration, because the lecturer speaks way too fast for newbies and speaks fastest when explaining the most complex concepts. This makes it tough to learn.