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Need to be clearer

not very clear

This is definitely the worst IBM course I have taken. Truly awful. The good: It introduces you to multiple visualization packages, albeit briefly. The instructor responses to most of my questions were detailed and helpful, though many responses I saw to other questions were unhelpful or even inaccurate. The bad: Where to begin? The course suffers from very poorly written/designed instructional materials. For example, students are often tasked with creating visualizations that don’t make much sense or are not optimal for the situation. The final project material is particularly awful. The dataset students are given is a synthesized dataset that is very poorly designed. Even the instructors are not sure exactly what the rows and some of the variables represent. Of course, creating a visualization using a dataset with a nonsensical structure is likely to produce a nonsensical result, but sometimes even the visualization prompts themselves are nonsense. Why were we asked to create a bar chart with two continuous variables and one categorical variable? Why were we asked to create a line chart for data that has multiple observations for specific x-axis values? Students complained about this, and the staff said they would fix it months ago but have not, which is another issue. You might often find yourself thinking “what abomination of a graph did I just create? Is this right?” then checking the solution code and seeing that you are correct, it is just a nonsense plot. I would be embarrassed to show somebody the work I created in this course, even though I did it correctly. Many of the quiz/exam questions and/or answers are either vague, nonsensical, or not very educational. As an example, a question on the final exam (which I will not write here) asked a question akin to asking “What feature of a car is helpful for buying a car?” What kind of a question is that? Students complained and the staff said they would remove it months ago but have not. Another question was like asking “What kind of animal is a dog?” and giving the answer choices: A) A furry animal B) An animal that hisses C) A lizard D) A dead animal What is that supposed to teach us? What do you mean by “kind”? The course materials are also full of typos. Did nobody proofread the course content and think critically about it? Some responses I saw from instructors also contained many serious typos. Also, as previously mentioned twice, errors and egregiously badly written course material are slow to get fixed (if at all?). I wasted so much time wondering if I was doing something right, if something was a typo, or what a vague prompt or question meant. The course materials also use deprecated functions, sending me on a hunt to find and learn the current functions. None of this is helped by the script-reading robot voice that often lacks subtle but important intonation and sentence pacing. Another, more foundational issue with the course is that it doesn’t really teach you that much about each visualization package. This is especially true for the dashboarding section. There is no way I would feel confident building a real dashboard for an organization with just the knowledge learned in this course. The lack of depth is also exacerbated by the fact that the visualizations being created are not well suited to the problem at hand or are based on nonsense data. If this course is meant to teach us useful skills, shouldn’t we be creating realistic visualizations that are representative of how a data analyst would visualize real-world problems? I could say more, but the bottom line is that I do not recommend this course for learning data visualization with Python. I seriously hope IBM overhauls this course.

Coursera:

The hands-on lab portion of the Coursera course "Data Visualization with Python" cannot be accessed for more than two weeks. Several students have posted their concerns, and they have not been answered."

On accessing the Skill Network through the site and clicking I am not a robot the screen appears that says "Please wait while we prepare to start your lab environment. This shouldn't take more than a minute." The connection either times out, or posts a gateway error more than 90% of time." I have tried on several networks, browsers and computers.

Attempts to bring this to Coursera Learning Services, led to the following email exchange:

From Coursera:

Thank you for contacting us and bringing this information to my attention.

I understand how important are your Learning goals and I'm truly sorry to know about the whole situation. The good news here is that you can Rate a course or course materials.

When you rate a course or course materials, the instructor will see your feedback. You won't usually get a reply to your comments, but if the instructor wants to follow up, you'll get an email notification to the email address you use for your Coursera account.

To rate a course:

Log into coursera.org to see a list of courses you’re taking.

Find the course you want to rate.

Above the course title, select the three-dot menu and click Rate Course to open the rating window.

In the rating window, rate the class by clicking one of the five stars.

You can also write an optional review of the course, but you won't get a direct reply.

Click Submit.

To change your rating or to send more feedback, repeat the steps above.

This is the easiest way to alert IBM about this inconvenience in the platform. I hope you find this information helpful. Please feel free to let me know if you have further questions.

Kind regards,

Coursera Learner Services

My Response:

Dear Coursera Learning Services,

This is an entirely unhelpful answer. My contractual relationship is with Coursera; you should manage your vendors.

Moreover, I have directly contacted the instructor, and despite their quick response, the problem remains unresolved.

I will file the report, because I sense that Coursera has no interest in advocating for their customers. I implore to advocate for your customers with your vendor to get this resolved.

Jayne

CAN SOMEONE TAKE OWNERSHIP OF RESOLVING THIS? PLEASE!

I have 2 professional Python certifications and have been programming for 3 years, but have little experience with the libraries covered in this course - this is an incredibly poor way to learn the subject matter even if you have familiarity with Python itself. Concepts are very poorly explained (sometimes even incorrect). Instructions and wording on quizzes, projects, and plugins are unclear and even nonsensical at times. The code in plugins and the final project is practically written for you - they are essentially fill-in-the-blank questions and do not measure your understanding of the material. The cloud IDE environment is extremely buggy, and even when it's not, the code they provide to set it up may not even be correct and will throw errors. For every hour spent in the course, you will spend 2 more seeking other sources. At the end of this, I do not feel confident in my ability to use Python visualization libraries despite getting an A in the course and being certified in the Python language itself, and will have to seek out an actual learning resource for this topic. This course is just an extremely frustrating required step in getting that little "IBM Data Analyst Certification" line on your resume. It is good for little else.

This course lacks of explanations. Theory is very badly built. It was clearly the worst that I have done so far. I only learn about the "existence" of some tools or posibilities but it is imposible to understand how those works.

As I said theory clarifies nothing and as for the practice exercices would only for advanced students who already know the tools and need to practice to remember again.

The final assigment reflects the lack of foundation wich is consistent in the whole course. But the worst is that you have to do a master just to post the answers. You have to really do a collage of images, cut paste... really artistic. It takes more time posting the answers than really doing the assignement. At the end you would be graded not only for the accomplish of the final assignement but for your skill in fitting different screen shots in one image. Very sad.

Lastly, it is very disappointing to see that students have been complaining for those things since 2019 and they haven't done anything about it. That is ignominious!

I was diapointed with the course.

1)the most important thing is the Skills Network Labs. As i saw in the comment section and from my expirience the software glitses alot. i had the same code without changing it and was trying for 2 hours and it showed me that i had made a syntax error. the next day i did the same and i had the same problem. after closing the window and opening a new terminal for several dozen times the program actualy worked! without me changing my code!

2) the instructions on how to take the screen shots at the final assigment and are horibble and so confusing.for example in the drop dwon menu question it should say: "take TWO!! screen shots of each drop down menu. and put them in one file"

3)the course never explains the HTML language and just tells you to copy past it and make minor changes on it.

most on my effort on this course was spent on fixing a problem that i found out was the softwares problem and then trying to interpert the sceenshot instructions for the final exam.

If I could if a zero star, I would. I desperately needed help, asked for it in the forums, and they deleted it! My IBM account on Watson was closed because I was not and COULD NOT pay the amount that IBM wants for their watson studio, so I had to sign up a different way to continue this program. However the labs that are used in this course won't let me use my new account and keep telling me that I needed to open a support ticket... which I did. Got no reply to that. What the point of having a help center when they're not willing to help?

I, personally, would NEVER use IBM Watson Studio's for anything if this is how they "help" you. I was very excited to start this "Perfessional Program" and now I feel like I wasted my time and money on this. So extremely frustrating. I only had thos course and two more to do and I would've been able to get the certificate. I will let whoever I need to know about this program and inform them to keep their money and time away from it.

The overall course is not bad (even when they repeat way more than necessary the same concepts), they give you hints about matplotlib and seaborn. But I cannot rate the course with more than one star because the final proyect is a complete mess. They spend 4/5 of the course teaching you about python and then, in the last proyect you need to control html and have an understanding of some technologies that didn't appear in the course, deal with outdated materials with errors (you need to scrap the internet for solutions to bugs and problems in the code they give you, unreal...), with the need of search for a solution in the forum, where other classmates are in the same confusion as you. The worst course inside the IBM specialization by far. Not recommended, there are way better courses online to learn python visualization.

Where to start? The staff does not answer or help with issues. In rare occasions that they do, it is to the two threats that are "recommendations" and "common syntax errors" no matter what the issue the person has. I had to prolong this course for two months due to this and still, no answers. Labs are full of errors, unclear instructions. The final peer assignment has parts that have not been clearly explained in the lectures or the labs (if you are lucky to have the labs work, My advice is to test if you can connect to localhost, if not, and you are on Windows 10 prepare for a long list of possible issues). If anyone asks me about this specialization, just based off of my experience with this course, I will recommend the Google Data Analytics spec.

It's a reasonable overview of data visualization with examples of Seaborn and applications in Plotly and Dash. But I think this course is too basic, an introduction at best. The quizzes are very easy, the application is interesting, but it doesn't prepare the student to build their own dashboards. The assignment grading system is by far the worst I've seen on MOOCs. I've taken more than 30 courses only at Coursera and this is the worst. There is no sense sending images of your solution in a programming course. For learning Dash I'd recommend some Coursera's projects that spend less time and teaches you more.

Half of what is in the final assignment is not taught in the lessons or the labs. In the forum this is what everyone is complaining about. You spend your time googling and youtubing to teach yourself when you still are paying the coursera subscription fee, I completed every video and every lab and then was surprised when the assignment asks for things that were never mentioned. When this is brought up in the forum the staff just reply saying you should do your own learning. VERY DISAPPOINTING . Some content was good but not very in depth so it was then unfair to have a final assignment that was in depth.

This module stands out from the others in the learning track as repetitive, poorly structured from a testing and assessment perspective and light on applicable content. For example, rather than giving a link to why pie charts should never be used, perhaps take some time to cover the main points. You could use some of the time that was spent cleaning the same data set in every video.

The final assessment was poorly-described and a number of discussions seem to centre around question 3 and its format in the question vs the answer.

I've enjoyed the course, but not this module.

Video lessons with male instructor should all be deleted immediately. Instead, these videos describing different graph types could be a single 5 min video instead of the multiple videos repeating the exact same content. The instructions for the labs in this course were very difficult to follow compared with other IBM courses. A minor detail, but the English in the lab instructions is also often incorrect, e.g. many instances of 'an' instead of 'a' and other incorrect language. The instructions for the final assignment are poor. The course is simply not worth the cost.

This course cannot be followed outside of IBM it appears

I have started this course and have tried to run the initial material to download the Canadian Immigration xlsx dataset. This is not possible to do as I need to have a "box" account in order to access the data. I assume that IBM employees have a corporate account for this, but I would have to sign up and pay for a box account. Surely if this course is on coursera and supposedly available for anyone to take, then the course should be runnable as is and I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to make it work.

I have tried to work through several of the secondary courses in the IBM Data Science course and have to say most of the Jupyter notebooks will fail in the lessons, as there are deadlinks, and files which are no longer hosted online in the given links. I am discontinuing these courses as it seems they are no longer being supported.

example: The first lab in the Data Visualization with Python Course, and The SpaceX Data Analytics Notebooks ended when i could not access the prescribed data locations.

This course is poorly designed comparing with other courses in the data science certificate. There are many errors in the solution of labs, which is very confusing for beginners to figure out by themselves. If you check the discussion forum, you will see how many people are clueless and were mis-guided by the wrong solution.

The final assignment is also too advanced and the skeleton codes that were given also had a lot of errors, Would be helpful if the mistakes can get fixed for future learners.

Final assignment doesnt work and after many hours of trying, Im yet to find a solution. Once again, another extremely poor quality IBM course. Strongly recommend AVOIDING this course. In an attempt to push their own software on you, theyve made it so the course doesnt work. Many frustrated people in the forums with one one active staff member replying (and even that is sporadically). My current error has been reported for months by different people with no solution provided.

There were so many problems with IMB's software and the course's set up in general so it was almost impossible to concentrate on learning- most time i was trying to resolve different issues with IBM Watson (sometimes it didn't work, in some instances i had to use my credit card!! to register to the IBM cloud) rather than to study Data Science. Just before the final capstone course I decided to cancel my subscription and switch to another non-IBM Data Science course.

absolute shit the dash stuff is absolute crap and there is so many random errors in part two of the assignment that its not worth trying to go through all the errors. IT IS THE MOST UNERGONOMIC PLATFORM EVER USED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. part one of assignment tells u to to take screenshots of things that arent necessary for submission and then doesnt tell you to take photos of the other things this is a complete joke and i wont be giving you guys anymore money

If I could give less stars, I would. The materials in the course were not explained properly, the labs did not work most of the time. In the discussion forum, all the help you get is someone telling you exactly what the instructions are (which is not working) and saying 'happy learning', like that is of any help at all. We wasted time on some subjects, only for the final assignment to be about dash and html, which have been extremely poorly explained.

This class was very disappointing. The language is awkward and difficult to understand. I'm unsure if it is a bad translation into English, or if it is AI generated, but much of it doesn't make sense. Some of the classes are out of order so the quizes reference material you haven't seen yet. It's hard to complete the labs because it is hard to understand what they are asking you to do. I would expect a course from IBM to at least be proofread.

Final assignment was the worst. Not difficult but simply to get the systems to work. Discussion forums are filled to the brim with people having difficulties. Tried to do it Jupyter notebook = issues, tried it in Thesia = issues. Instructors have made detailed information on frequent issues on the forums but compared to the 8 other courses in the IBM data analyst certificate this is by far the most problematic course.

Worst course in the data science sequence so far. Explanations are vague, examples do not always work, and assignments have new components added to them, the data are poorly suited for the visualizations (scatterplots are not used to show trends over time) and the instructor is too interested in showing how to make advanced (but little used) visualizations because they look cool--instead of focusing on common basics.