This course is not practical at all--it's a detailed overview of concepts that, for beginners, are meaningless until you begin working within those constructs. Furthermore, the online IDE is not functional--it will not load and indicates it is under maintenance or gives an error code. So, in order to complete the practicals of this course, you have to set up your own environment, for which there are no instructions. Fortunately, my husband is a sr. software developer and was able to help me troubleshoot setting up Rstudio, wherein the links, libraries, and other resources are all out of date.

Furthermore, I'm now 5 weeks into this program and have not learned anything. Fortunately, I know I am interested in programming and data science already after working in other resources (e.g. Data Quest) that provide actual hands on education, rather than a computerized voice reading script that contains erroneous details with no immediate practical application.

Such a disappointment. I expect more from IBM.

There are issues with the final exam preventing people (including myself) from passing. These issues have been raised going as far back as a month without any moderator intervention (from what can be seen on the forum). Despite there being 20 moderators to this course, there appears to be just 1 active moderator and they havent responded to this issue. There is no way of contacting staff to raise this as an issue to be fixed except to raise it on the forum. In doing so, you break the Coursera Honour Code (as Ive just discovered). Im currently unable to complete this course due to this issue and Im hoping this one star review brings the matter to the attention of the staff responsible for the course.

This course should be combined to the previous course. Totally unnecessary and fruitless. Being able to distinguish "open source" and "free access" is hardly anything useful for a data scientist, while important things like "WHAT'S THE BENEFIT OF LEARNING MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGES" are never picked up to motivate the learners. Before the course, I had no idea about Julia, Rubic, or C++, and after the course, I still don't.

On the other hand, this has nothing to do with the instructors. I believe they are just following some designer or superviser's order to read the script. I appreciate your work and effort, despite I don't like this course. I also thank Coursera for their financial aids.

Very poorly designed. The course, from week 1, video 1 uses terminomogy and talks about things that are only introduced in the later parts of the course so for someone with no prior experience it's really hard to understand and follow. Also, the videos are based on an older version of IBM Watson Studio interface so it's difficult to follow the video and do the exercises alongside. There are some optional videos and assignments but these are tested in the practice quiz. For those who opt out of them it's impossible to proceed with the course unless they complete the quizes.

I am really starting to regret investing my time and money in this course. I expected much better from IBM.

The entire IBM watson studio is is a massive disaster in this course. Everything went fine till the watson studio came into picture, after that there is no learning , your precious time will be wasted to configure a broken system (which will not work in the end) and that has almost no relevance to what you have signed up for.

From there onwrarsds the videos and the content do not match and you will get completely derailed from your learning because someone wants you to use their product . This is not learning but almost shadow selling practice.

I was in for the entire course , but will now need to think if this is worth my time.

Hands-on parts do not work at all, after more than three weeks trying to solve all issues with the IBM Cloud I decided to drop the course due to being charged and not getting decen support to resolve the account settings issues.

If you come here for hand-on labs and learning go elsewhere. Jumping through hops, and dedicating more time troubleshooting the account permissions is awful. Not a single step-by-step guide worked in regards to the IBM Cloud due to this... Staff did not solve my issue after three different agents tried, and basically gave up.

I do not recommend this course; however, as it's part of the Data Science Certificate it's unavoidable. The course is basically an introduction to an IBM online software that lets you use R, Python, etc. without having to download them. That's fine, but it could realistically be done in about five minutes instead of the two hours the course takes to complete. My advice is either don't take this class if you aren't going for the Certificate, or go through it as fast as possible if you are going for the Certificate. This course was a waste of time.

I hate to give this comment. Poor quality videos and study material. Not simply it misstated the fact that this is a Beginner course, there is also lack of effort in each of the videos made, making beginner very difficult to follow due to frequent switch of screens, making corrections in the video... The Reading/Lab section is also not helpful in terms of giving clear instructions. I only understood 10% of the materials from this course and learned everything else by myself on Youtube and other sources. The videos definitely need to be remade.

This course is a huge disappointment. It is more of a promo of IBM Watson Studio than an actual class. It would be much more useful to make a course about the Anaconda framework, which is a useful desktop framework that I believe many data scientists actually use.

The Watson Studio does not seem to be that good either. It is not exactly intuitive and it takes some getting used to before you can navigate through it. The instruction videos and pictures in the lectures do not help much since they are out of date. It is slow too.

The videos were fairly informative. They only instructions on how to install/access some of the programs and platform use, most of this information is incomplete or obsolete as certain platform were still inaccessible. e.g I had figure out how to download Jupyter Notebook myself, and lucky I did as that was the only way I could open the handout files in the course - the links they provided NEVER worked. Even the final assignment had two different sets of instructions, causing confusion and frustration among students.

Most of the videos are outdated and even the written lab instructions can use the incorrect terminology. This seemed to be more of an advertisement for IBM's data science tools than anything actually helpful. The section that covered the various languages and environments was decent, but a lot of the course feels like they're putting the cart before the horse... going through advanced machine learning programs before actually teaching anyone the fundamentals of data science is *not* the right way to do this.

Program information advises that this course is ideal for beginners with no prerequisites required. This is absolutely 'false'. Week 2 of the program is most certainly about programming, writing code, utilizing Git/Github and a video with an instructor going 90 miles an hour offering instructions on creating a new project that was totally confusing which lead to my decision to cancel my subscription of this course. Refer to Week 2 Discussion Forum for comments of other participants. Very disappointed.

Videos seem to be copied in from third parties. They do not have a logical progression and often overlap.

Many instances of the video showing an obsolete version of the software to the point that it is impossible to follow the instructions given, and the students must scour the forums or google to find their own solutions. This type of learning is not worth paying for.

Exercises were not educational. My only takeaway from this course was one sentence summarizing the tools given and markdown shorthand.

Very poorly organized. I was taken straight to the video section at the beginning of this course. Unfortunately, the videos dive right into coding in Python, even though the first course in this series had never discussed Python!

Also, the quizes do a poor job of educating someone like me who is new to Data Science. Important subjects are skimmed through in a very ad hoc fashion, and then the quiz begins, but you cannot reference the notes that cover that quiz.

Overall, very poor course design.

As an introductory course, (which it is supposed to be) this course is awful.

The videos consist of large amounts of technical jargon that are not understandable to someone who is a beginner. There is very little explanation of why or how something is being done.

Many of the instructions have not been updated for the most recent version of the tools .

There are many, many, many confused people on the message boards over the last few months, yet nothing has been done to correct it.

The videos are outdated for several months now. The content must've been good before, but now it is useless considering Watson Studio has been updated radically.

We're paying real non refundable money for something like this! This is not acceptable. This issue has also been raised in the discussion forums but nothing has changed.

I have been digging in the forums trying to follow the course but It is impossible to !!

I feel cheated, and so will you, if you enroll here!!

One of the most frustrating courses I've taken yet, mainly due to outdated materials leading to inability to follow instructions. One cannot create an account in IBM Watson Studio, and the UI's shown in the material are also not the updated UI, leaving the user to have to Google every other second to follow the instructions.

Week 3 felt more like a marketing and training effort by IBM, rather than the insightful instruction the former weeks were. Utterly annoying.

If you are looking for a middle-school level course with a (un)healthy side of IBM product marketing and advertising, this course is for you. Perhaps I have been spoiled by the good quality of Deeplearning.AI and Andrew Ng's excellent courses with their good coverage of the topics. They provide excellent slides you can download and annotate during the lectures, and WORKING labs that have a good balance in implementation difficulty and insight into the problem.

They push you to use non functioning IBM tools (they crash, you have to register but need to look for ways to by pass credit card requirement, etc) and advertise some products of IBM related to Data Science. The whole course is except GitHub and RStudio sections is total loss of time. If you do peer graded assignments in Watson Studio, it does not work, so you have to do it again with GitHub. I have never seen such an unnecessary course in my whole life.

The peer-graded assignment system is broken. I completed all tasks entirely and to the exact instructions. I have been deducted points for no valid reason by my peer. The staff response to me in the forums is that I need to "reattempt and resubmit". Where is the oversight to ensure peer-graded assignments are being graded fairly and correctly? What am I paying for? I shouldn't have to waste my time resubmitting due to incorrect grading by a peer.

This certification track is complete garbage! The first course was superficial definitions of Data Science - I can look all that up on my own! The second course was very sloppy with the instructions, the screen shots did NOT match what I saw on Watson studio, when I reached out for help, the instructors response was totally unhelpful. Coursera needs to either revamp this course or cancel it! This was a huge waste of time and money!

Very poor at the moment. Week 2 Rstudio section has a downloadable map, after lots of work I did manage to do a workaround to get the zip file but then it couldn't be loaded. Equally and worse Week 3 covers Watson Studio, this has changed from Data Science Experience; the blurb says that its just a name change but thats not correct and I wasted hours trying to follow the instructions from the old layout through to the new layout.

Video tutorials are outdated, based on the old interface of IBM tools. Teachers are not giving instructions how to get some of the tools like Jupyter notebook of RStudio, they don't say which libraries needs to be installed before doing exercise and finally they don't show the full code which they're running. Overall it's a presentation of IBM products and those two open source products mentioned above, with a bit of GitHub.

Very high level course. It list many tools used for data science however does not explain them in details. The course better suits the person who is experienced in data science to discover tools rather than a person who just started learning the data science. Lots of information is irrelevant, strongly promoted IBM products, the Week 3 of the course consist of poorly put together presentations recorded by different people

Extremely poor. First few hours cover nothing beyond the name of a number of products and historical facts. Unable to continue through the course as the required IBM Cloud account that I set up was suspended without reason by IBM, and cannot be reactivated. Cannot create another account, so cannot continue the course. Luckily this occured within the trial period before payment, however this is completely unacceptable.