[[suggestions for improvements included]]

As a teacher, I understand that trying new materials means experimenting and fixing as you go, but there should be a disclaimer for the students switching from the previous version. Students encouraged to switch to newer version were promised a better experience with updated materials and that is not what I got.

Instruction and Hands on Activity are not properly set-up to help students succeed in the final project. The hands on activities don't have solutions so one can't check if they are understanding. The final project took hours to complete because their was not enough guidance. Please include the following in your directions or hands on activities:

1) How to reset the index without deleting a column

2) How to change the types of a column in a dataframe

3) what it means it means to "save" the reset_index (b/c the term "save" wasn't used in the previous version or hands on Activity)

4) A sample code on how to make a dataframe using a loop while webscraping

5) A intro and example on how to use BeautifulSoup

Ps. Using the forum to read how other students bypassed their issues was helpful!

This course is:

a) Poorly explained. There are literally zero 'lessons' or accompanying videos. Also, the vast bulk of the content is completely new - as far as I'm aware 'web scraping' was not been covered by any previous course. There really should be some supporting video material from an instructor - I have found myself searching on forums and google for explanations - a strong sign that the course content did not prepare or teach me very well at all.

b) Too hard! I spent far too long on small steps in the labs because had no idea how to do something that seems like it should be trivial. These steps blocked me from completing the questions. I eventually got there through dumb luck and referring to other students help in the forums. I still don't understand what it is I am supposed to have actually done as no advice or example solution is given for that step.

c) Very frustrating for anyone like myself who has nearly completely the specialisation. After months of following a scheduled course structure then to be thrown into a new topic with minimal / no lessons and then tested feels unfair and completely unnecessary for anyone who paid to start the specialisation when it was not part of the overall syllabus.

Overall I wouldn't mind about the new course if I felt like I had actually learnt something useful. Instead, this course has been very frustrating throughout and largely forgettable.

This course is basically the equivalent of someone being told theoretically how to swim. And then being thrown directly into the deep end, and told to learn as they go.

It's also the perfect example of someone (course designer) who knows their topic well, but fails to explain it at a level that beginners to the topic can easily understand and absorb.

Please redesign the entire course.

This course is frustrating!

1) there are no videos or examples to obtain answers for the videos... it is not beginner-friendly!

2) Did so much research on the internet and I still have no idea what is going on! I am completely confused about how to complete the final assignment !! YouTube videos are too advance for my level! (I HATE THIS!)

3) This is delaying my progress and I was almost done with the data science course

This course feels like it was rushed. It is full of grammatical errors and inconstancies. I don't exactly understand what value it adds to the certificates and specializations. I would not recommend it to anyone.

This course does not have the quality I expect compare to other courses in the certificate program I have taken. This is a self-learning class to work on a Python project. There are typos and unclear instructions. The ungraded exercise for web scraping seems corrupted in my first downloaded but works fine the second time. The final assignment took longer than 30min because you must find and learn the new codes required to complete the project yourself, there were no teaching in the class! The submission and grading are being changed during the weeklong course. I am glad there were help from Discussion Forum contributors/volunteers who is also taking the class, seems everyone is struggling on similar topics. IBM Cloud / Watson Studio also has a time limit on a free account, so you may need to upgrade and paid if you spent too much time on the project. I hope the new version of this course is much improved.

so little material to review. basically google everything and search discussion forums to get the answer. it is really frustrated and it wastes my time to do that. :(

It was a really nice project to work on. I see some people are complaining about the lack of information in order to solve the problems. But before taking this project, you should have finished the previous courses and even then you still need to use Google in order find solutions to questions. This is part of programming you need use Google and several coding sites in order to solve your problems. This project forces you to do that cuz in real life you will have to use Google very often to solve your problems. There is no one book covers everything or every solution to your problem. You gotta dig into it and that is that. I am excited more to come keep looking and good luck!

Excellent! I´m reading some bad reviews and I feel the need to share my thoughts. I was very surprised that the final assignment was not explicitly demonstrated on the classes. And that is awesome! IBM really put effort on building the students skills for a professional certificate. To show knowledge in Pandas and BeautifulSoup we must read documentation and search for ourselfs. The course was great, if you really want to become a Data Scientist dive on it!

Does not provide the nesseccary resources to achieve a high grade. Students must use each other as well as the internet to find out how to complete the project.

The labs and readings did not provide an adequate background for the final assignment.

As I'm writing this, I am going through the IBM Data Analyst Professional Certification program and this was course number 5 out of 9. I had anticipated that the final project would be somewhat more difficult than I had expected since the previous course "Python for Data Science, AI, and Development" covered a lot of materials and I have no Python background previously. It turned out that if you have completed that course and did all the Hands-on Lab sessions, willing to Google, and look around in the discussion forum, you will be able to pass this course easily just like I did.

I enjoyed this class. It has less lecture and more figuring things out. It was not in my original certificate program, and I decided to go upgrade and pick it up. Glad I did.

This is my first time reviewing a course on Coursera since have already taken the first 5 courses in this specialization (excluding this, because they added it recently). This course is the worse by far. The material is very poor to the point where I literally googled everything. I hope someone from IBM read this to avoid such materials in the future.

Much to be desired had to search internet for most of the learning material for projects.

This was one of my favorite courses of the IBM Data Science certificate. Not only did I feel like I was doing something practical, but the assignment made me apply concepts I learned in previous courses and it didn't give me the solutions. It gave me the confidence that I am really learning this stuff.

The course itself is nice and the material presented in the course is useful: you will learn how to obtain information from the websites directly with pything and will learn the very basics of the BeautifulSoup library.

But please, add more explainations about what the students are working with. I expect the course I paid for to actually teach me new features about the new (for me) python library, but not only force me to read the documentation on the internet and hectically look for answers on StackOverflow. It's good that a course should encourage such self-learning, but if it's only self-learning, then the course should be free.

A very unnecessary course included at the middle of the specialization. It does not illustrate the knowledge of plotly as mentioned and even there is no explanation of dashboard. It must be included either at the end or after the data visualization course with more knowledge on how to make visualization or dashboard in plotly. Thank You.

I appreciated the more hands approach of the course. I would just help guide the students a bit better i. e. some things weren't fully explained such as resetting the index or finding the max value of a particular column, etc., which in turn lead to Google searching and using stackoverflow for answers.

All in all not a great course but not a bad one either. If they tweak it a bit in order to clarify some of the confusion, I think it has potential, especially for hands on learners such as myself.

This course was added to the curriculum for the IBM Data Science course while I was already enrolled in Databases and SQL for Data Science with Python. After finishing that course, Coursera wouldn't allow me to enroll in the next course, Data Analysis with Python. I was notified, "you are currently enrolled in an old version of the specialization. Upgrade the specialization to continue with your purchase." When I click to upgrade, there's an error. I assumed this was due to the addition of Python Project for Data Science, so I thought I would start this course instead of moving on to the next course. Coursera charged me $49 to add the Python Project for Data Science course, when I was under the impression that all courses are included in my subscription fee.

I do think it's important to be able to pull data from HTML, and how that process works was interesting. However, I found that the labs, especially the final assessment, did not follow very closely with the videos. This course required a lot more independent research when compared to other courses in the curriculum. There were multiple typos in the labs, and the whole thing felt thrown together as an afterthought. Now it's preventing me from enrolling in other courses until I figure out how to upgrade the version I'm enrolled in.

Would be nice if they added some video tutorials on how to web-scrape, Previous courses did not teach you how to do this.

This is the worst course of this IBM certificate so far. This course is terrible and need a complete overhaul.

There are no videos, the labs do not explain half of the content and I had to Google most of the solutions, which wasted a few weeks and my money to pay for Coursera.

The labs also contain incorrect links that are needed to pull data from wensite when webscraping. The labs are even out of date, so the libraries that are pre-coded to install at the beginning don't cover the code needed to complete the lab... which is part of the graded assignment.

Also, there has not been any explanation of how to run Python in your terminal or in an interpreter, so the course leaves out any practical application as is strictly theoretical.

There are also spelling mistake throughout and you must use the Discussion Forums to figure out why the labs are broken.

It was an awesome and very hard experience. I struggled a lot with the final assignments, which led to me learning a lot of new things and learning them good. I am giving this project/course 10/10.

Several bugs in the code and outdated Python libraries made completing the course extremely difficult. Had to get advice from other students who struggled, rather than the instructors. Course could use a serious revision.

I found this course very frustrating. I felt like they didn't really explain how to do anything and that you really needed to have more background in Python to understand how to do it. I honestly had to go back and make sure that I didn't miss a course that would've set me up for this course. I managed to get through the final assignment but I didn't learn anything and wouldn't be able to duplicate anything I did. This course really made me re-think about pursuing this whole area of study since I had such a frustrating time with this. This course definitely needs more tutorials with hands-on experience; something besides things like opening a Watson Studio account.