not so deep in python and starting from week 4 started to be messy

Not for someone with zero python knowledge

Failures in grammar, logic and wording.

not Beginners Friendly

too easy

Worst of the IBM Data Science Prof. Cert. so far. I disliked almost every part of it.

Typos throughout all slides and exercises, labs almost never worked online and had to be downloaded, transcripts are off, responses in the discussion forum were late and/or not always friendly (especially to some seemingly knowledgable participants who pointed out code flaws or such - just followed some of the threads and was irritated by some responses), but amongst all the flaw that makes me think about quitting this certificate this course is part of: absolutely no clear framework obvious. What are the main questions this course answers apart from just giving us a bunch of information? Where are we and which goal will we reach, i.e., what will we be able to do with the knowledge? As someone who has been teaching at big international universities, I would argue that the story of this course is lacking or absolutely unclear and there was not much though given in terms of pedagogy. I passed the final exam right away with 100% even I didn't feel like a learned a lot I could really apply. That being said: I don't want to participate in a course just to pass and get the badge. Instead, I would like to learn something that could help me right away. Unfortunately, for this course, this was in no way the case. I very much hope the next one will be better or I will quit and leave Coursera.

I struggled to learn with this course. I have some experience coding with Python already and feel like the Python beginners course from University of Michigan (Python for everyone) was much better at learning Python for data analytics even though the course objective was more to learn about Python rather than data analytics. I didn't like the clunky and cluttered feel of programming in Jutyper. Previous courses I've taken in Python, the video or lecturer would usually code in the shell or an IDE and you'd see the code being done, you'd go practice in an uncluttered IDE where you could debug things easily and I felt like I learned quite easily. This course kind of just lectures through the code and uses visuals to represent the program which I feel is not a good way to teach coding/programming. The beginning weeks were easy because I knew all the content, but I could see it was taught using poor methods in my opinion. When it got to the material at the end which I'd never learned before, I could really feel how slow and difficult it was to retain the information being presented in the videos. I think it would help a lot by doing videos in an IDE and provide a textbook to easily refer back to the content instead of having to click through a video to do so.

I hate giving a bad review for this course, especially considering the immense amount of content covered in it. However, the uncountable mistakes in the labs, with dysfunctional solutions, hints that are in the wrong place and a general lack of practical exercises, especially in the end of the course, make me feel like I have no choice. There are far too many instances where code goes completely unexplained as well. I've spent way too many hours trying to understand what I did wrong in some exercises, only to find some of the given solutions to be wrong themselves. Furthermore the course completely fails to teach the fundamental basics of python in the sense of how to write python on ones own computer, what software is necessary and how a script can be run. The sole focus on code means that I leave this course with basic theoretical knowledge of how to write code, but zero knowledge in how to actually do that. I think the course either needs to be reworked extensively or rebuilt from the ground up. The sheer amount of inconsistencies and errors unfortunately leaves me no other option but to come to that conclusion.

Pros - The video lectures are easy to understand and follow. The vocal clarity of the speakers is great. Cons - This course offers a very high level explanation of some concepts and then introduces brand new, more complex, concepts in the lab. This is okay, but in order to be really successful you need to be industrious enough to do further reading on your own. The lab is 100% dependent on the Jupyter notebook, which has some bugs in the libraries provided. I prefer to use Pycharm on my own machine, and had to figure out how to run some of the code locally (the asynchronous functions in particular did not work out of the box). At the end, I feel like I am prepared enough to take a multiple choice test on data types, data structures, and some API related concepts, but I do not necessarily feel prepared to actually do any coding.

The worst course I've taken so far. I used to learn on udemy before switching to Coursera because of more well-known providers. This entire IBM Data Analyst Professional Certificate has been mostly way too easy. Explanations don't seem to be technically accurate and simplify concepts a lot. Especially the in the Python module, the basics of programming are skimmed through while the exercises are designed at a significantly more difficult level. A lot of students seem to be frustrated with this part and apparently, nothing is being done to improve this course. Why people are still taking it? To have some certificate from a reknown company on their LinkedIn profile. Do people actually learn in this course? Yes, but only because nothing is being taught here and students are forced to do their own research to solve the exercises.

Again, IBM must rethink who is in its curriculum and instructional design teams. The practice quizzes merely copy the questions from the videos, which ask you to evaluate what a code block will do. This would be fine IF THEY PROVIDED YOU WITH THE CODE BLOCKS. But, they don't. They rely on you recalling what the code blocks were. At BEST, this is problematic and fails to account for the lived experiences of the student, who may be taking the quiz well after watching the video or doing the labs. At WORST, it shows that this course is nothing more than a bald cash grab designed for people to speed through, thereby making the whole certificate meaningless. Source, I'm a curriculum and instruction expert in both training (Ph.D. in education) and training (active teaching professor).

Basically just an interactive advertisement for IBM's new product. Videos aren't very helpful as they show snippets of code without the context in which they would be applied in an actual program. Labs are okay but they use the aforementioned IBM product, and it honestly isn't that great and it isn't something someone using python to do data science would use in a professional setting. The information given about Pandas and Numpy is embarrassingly lacking so the point where doing the final lab is nearly impossible unless you already know what you're doing or you search for information elsewhere. Not why I pay money for Coursera. Wish I could have my money and time back honestly.

terrible course. i hope not all beginner python courses are like this one. the issue is not that its difficult but there multiple recurring instances of undefined items, unexplained code etc. for a beginner its a disaster. by module 5 you have no idea what is going on. whoever designed this course should be replaced and the course redesigned truly for beginners. for the record i am a finance professional with advanced degrees, i have prior basic programming experience and i also got 95% for this course. terrible course (just shaking my head), waste of time and money

I'm not sure which parts of the lessons are advertisement and which parts are actual exercises that need to be completed. You are instructed in each segment (so hundreds of times) to not forget to press Shift-Enter for your instructions to be run which is annoying for something so simple. Then the lesson throws you into the deep end by telling you to get an account of gethub using gist to save your jupyter thing and you end up completely lost after clicking on too many links. I might have two accounts of gethub or none--I have no idea.

I was not a fan of this course. It feels like this course was hastily put together. The practice quizzes for the first 3 weeks are just repeats of the questions brought up during the videos. There are often concepts that are either not brought up or explained fully, that are then being quizzed on. There are typos throughout the labs. If I hadn't already had a fair bit of python knowledge coming into this course, I'm not sure I would have passed it as well as I did. I would recommend learning these concepts with a different course.

I had been taken several courses with Coursera but this data science specialization lacks good planning and clear directions to complete. I asked many times the same question. I was stuck in the last assignment of week 5 and requested help but the responses were not adequate, I contacted the teacher assistants and even the instructor and just received an email to contact Coursera services. They just ignored me; I'm not sure how many students they have but several others have the same issue with Week 5.

I'm really disappointed with this course. I'm totally new to Python and I can confidently say that I merely grasped around a 20% of the whole content. Some videos are extremely short and fast. If you are new to this programming language, then it will be extremely hard to follow in those cases. And regarding the Hands-On Labs, some of them are good, but a lot of them teaches stuff like you are already familiar with Python, and not a begineer.

The third party tool is completely unreliable and it makes this course dissapointing and frustrating.

I wasted too much time trying to make it work, since it was either under maintenance or issuing bad gateway errors.

From the discussion boards, I saw that I was not the only one getting this type of errors, so it would be nice if a better tool could be used or maybe provide alternate instructions to use those Jupiter pages in Watson.

In my opinion, this course was very poorly constructed. The videos were OK, but the labs contained exercises that were very difficult to understand (because of grammar, syntax, etc.). It is hard enough to try and understand the python language. When the English language is not used appropriately, it can make understanding assignments very difficult. I posted several comments asking for help and never received a single reply.

I saw a bunch of people complaining about how instructions did not align with labs from almost two years ago. Two year later - nothing has changed.

Save yourself time, money, and frustration and pursue the Google certificate in lieu of the IBM variant.

My name is Tyler and I already completed the Google variant and currently work as a Data Integrity Analyst in a manufacturing environment using SAP with EDI flow.

There's no way this should be considered a "Beginners" course. Exercises in labs for week 3 and 4 are very hard. The videos are very understandable but the lab excercises are too difficult. There are way too many gaps in information. The labs seem to introduce everything nice and simply, but then hit you with an exercise that is way to difficult and often uses techniques that have not been explained at all!

This course is not beginner friendly. It jumped right into the meat of things without proper explanation of terminologies, logic, and reasoning. Other than that, the videos are so hard to follow because the narrator talks so fast and the slides go by so quick. If you have expereince with Python, then this is recommended, but this is far from the "Beginner level" that this course is advertised as.

This course does a really good job to include and teach as much of python programming principles as possible in as little time as possible. I put a 1-star however, only because I expected that there was more step by step and gradual teaching and instructions on applying the theoretical concepts on data management. The progress curve in the labs applications was really steep unfortunately!

Lot's of good content. But the labs are very superficial and they just repeat what shown in the videos. The quizzes are too easy and they do not push you to actually apply what you learned. The final assignment was ridiculous. Just using Pandas to import some data, nothing more, no loops, no if statements, no analysis of the data. Continuing being quite dissatisfied with this certificate.

This course was not well designed. It needs intensive editing and rewriting.

The author emphasize the use of IBM cloud products, but the course needs to elaborate in this area if this is the desired target.

Not enough explanations were dedicated to the Python language itself. To succeed you must know some Python before you learn the course, or learn during the course from other sources.