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The first 7 courses were fantastic. Teachers were great- lessons were great- activities were great.

However the Case Study gets the biggest F (0 stars) that I can possibly rate. I did not finish it, I could not upload the giant files to any tool to be able to analyze it and I was stuck on a few things that did not work and was frustrated and lost.

Here are the reasons.

1. The files (for case study 1) are very large- and most learners do not have access to the enterprise versions of tableau, sheets, Rcloud or Google Big Query. Therefore, you were unable to get the files to where you needed them to be to use the tools that we learned about. I have used these tools for many years and I knew that on Big Query, you can create a bucket and load them there but the other software was not able to process files especially over 100MB

2. Since this was all new to us, I felt like i was just thrown into the fire- There was no way to get help on specific questions like 'I'm having trouble understanding what the ask is- or what the business task was.' There was a business task defined, but then we were only assigned step 1. I didn't understand if we were supposed to share and provide possible solutions for that question or the over all task.

3. The case study PDF needs to be much more verbose on what we are supposed to do. There are some suggestions like find the mode and mean and make sure the data is clean, but if one of those didnt work, again it was hard to figure out why and try to solve the issue.

4. I did not like the fact that there was no direction on what we were supposed to be looking for. We were supposed to analyze the data (once we got the upload problem solved and then joined the files and created all the extra calculated columns) there were some hints, but all were we supposed to do (in a nutshell ) is look at all the ways the membership people were different than the casual people. Once you look at some graphs (if you could figure out what you were supposed to graph) I was not sure what to do after that- Was I supposed to wait for the other team members to complete their parts and then work with them to come up with a share and act?

5. No matter what path you selected, the videos and materials took you through BOTH scenarios and I thought I kept picking the wrong one after I watched and read about case study 1. It should take you to the next phase after you select a study. Again confusing.

6. I would have all the career and interview and resume stuff in an optional module. We were learning about the case study, then went to resumes and interviews and it was a broken path that just made me wait until all that was done before I even started the study.

Anyway- I didnt get hardly anything out of the case study. And that waas disappointing to me as it is such an important part of doing data analysis. I felt I was alone out on an island and really had no clue what I was supposed to be doing.

Considering the pricetag and self-paced flexibility of the course, I suppose I couldn't realistically expect much more. However, I would be remiss if I didn't at least offer a suggestion, for how I think the course could be improved. A better course design would offer not only an improved means of some assistance (either in the form of web-conferencing, being able to call a tutor/instructor help desk, or even just an email address to send questions to, when we get stuck). In addition, it would be helpful to either have the 8th class consist of several graded assisngments, that would each be a portion of a case study, that would be reviewed by a human, and that we would be given some feedback on, so that by the end of the 8th course, we would know that we have a case study that would help us to land a job. Either that, or the aforementioned review/grading/feedback process could de divided up, and incorporated into the first 7 classes, so that by the start of the 8th class, we would already have a job-ready case study for our portfolio. From that point, the 8th course could focus on having Google or Coursera staff reviewing our LinkedIn pages, resumes, and portfolios look, to further polish everything up, and have us do at least one mock interview, in which we present the case study that we just finished. I realize that the cost is supposed to be affordable (and compared to a university, it is), but tweaking the certificate, in an effort to provide a better service to the students, in the manner described above, would make the program even more valuable to the consumer. If my suggestions were offered to me (and future students), either at no additional charge (or at a fairly nominal additional fee), I would give the program a 5-star rating. But, for the price, it gave me some beginner's knowledge of R, SQL, and Tableau, and improvde my knowledge of Excel, so I feel that it is worthy of a 4-star review.