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The instructor went way too fast over the SQL commands. I mean, it was ridiculous. I do IT for a living, so I was able to keep up after stopping, going back, reviewing multiple times, and then proceeding. My two friends are totally lost . One wants to leave the medical field, and the other is trying to leave retail, so this training is important to them and their futurte. But, I am having to tutor them. One has lost confidence is close to dropping out. The other is not sure. This is due in part to the instructor in my opinion. Knowing subject material doesn't mean that you can teach it to others. I have taught computer-related classes at a university for 22 years, so I believe that I have a little more insight than the average student. If you take these reviews seriously, then take my advice, review your training methods. Answer this question: do we want students with little technical background to succeed? I think you do. Make it happen. It's that easy. Teach the material, but slow it down with the advanced material and don't fly through it. For me this has beena great 5 classes, but for my friends, they are on the verge of dropping out, and I just hate to see their future dreams crumble.

This course was on the longer side but it was packed with a ton of info, so possibly the most valuable course so far in the class.

Some pros and cons:

Pros

Tons of information - SQL, spreadsheets, functions, etc. And plenty of time explaining them to the point I was surprised when we rehashed a few topics a bit, but that is better if you didn't get it the first time.

Plenty of great outside links to continue/expand education beyond the class. Love this.

Hands on experience in BigQuery - anything hands on is invaluable when learning and I was happy to see this was implemented

Cons

My only gripe - and I will say I know this is a Google class, so I get it - is the overuse of Google Sheets. There are some workflows that don't translate well over to Excel, specifically in making pivot tables and assigning values in them. This part was very frustrating because I had to have a friend explain to me how to do something in Excel when you were teaching Google sheets and had little to no Excel documentation. Again, I get that this is a google class, but Excel is industry standard and I feel like if I walked into any other business and said I use google sheets for professional work, they would laugh at me.

i will be honest, this course definitely made me feel really disappointed. now i cant judge the whole thing yet since i only just completed week 1, but the quality difference is plain to see. This week 1 feels like it was made without considering what was taught in previous courses- why would you dedicate a whole week into sorting and filtering..?

Hopefully i can just storm through this course then go to udemy to learn whatever sql syntax they will teach here+ other stuff

Edit: Finished this course, gotta say that while it isnt the best within this google analytics course, it still feels pretty comprehensive and i feel like i learnt alot. granted, stuff like subqueries were just skimmed through and i definitely need to practice more after this, but it is clear the instructor knew her stuff and tried to make her teaching good (i love the intermediate sql pdf that summaries functions taught, although theres none on subqueries)

i think i was too harsh on the rating since you know, this is a google course. but overall i think its still a fantastic course and we just need to remind ourselves this isn't the holy grail to data analytics; we still need to learn more outside this

The course materials are great, but the instructor is disappointing. She's too fast in demonstrating and the screen is too small and at times not in focus. I learned most of the materials from the Hands-on activities.  The video using JOIN, alias and CASE together is a disastrous one, especially since we have not previously introduced CASE. She also didn't consistently type "AS", so it makes it a lot more difficult to follow, especially for first-time learners.

Most importantly, she typed the wrong data set name for the new_york_bikeshare data set in Bigquery. Instead of typing new_york_citibike_citibike_trip,  she typed new_york.citibike_trip in the query in both the week 2 CONCAT in a SQL query and the week 4 Temporary Table videos, even though she showed the correct data table for bike_trip earlier in the video. As a result, my results are different from hers since the new_york.citibike_trip is from the new_york data set and not from the new_york_citibike data set and are different. I hope this will be corrected.

I assume that the content is based upon knowledge of the necessary topics to fundamentally prepare for the a job as an entry-level data analyst so in that respect (only) I would give the module 5 stars. The instructor moved from introductory methods using a spreadsheet to SQL syntax to perform the same analytical methods. Again, 5 stars for content and the ability of the instructor to make the topics understandable and to demonstrate their usage.

Where I felt the instruction fumbled and detracted from its overall excellence was in areas regarding SQL syntax where either the syntax was incorrect or a corrective slide was inserted but was incorrect and times that writing bigquery queries came back with syntax error messages, or even the time that for some reason I received an error message that I my project hadn't started within bigquery and therefore I couldn't run the query. That cost not only days of frustration but impacted the overall amount of time it took me to complete the lesson and/or module.

This course was definitely challenging and I think I can provide a couple of suggestions that might help you guys improve things in the future: 1- I believe it would be great if, during the course, you guys could choose only one database and use it throughout the different topics because it is especially challenging to learn new tools and functions already to then have to process new datasets on each video. Allowing learners to adapt and understand one dataset might make learning about the following topics a lot easier because you don't have to understand a new database, just a new process, function, formula, etc while working with the same data. 2- Some topics are more complex than others, but it seems like you guys dedicate the same amount of time to developing each regardless of its complexity. This makes me feel overwhelmed because I feel like more complex topics deserve longer videos and lectures. So I would advise dedicating more time to more complex topics as they are harder to understand.

This course was certainly more nuts and bolts than the previous courses which was nice, but there was definitely a feeling that it missed some major teaching opportunities about aggregation in SQL and seemed to have a lot more small issues regarding things like pulling variables differently on screen and in the actual database from the reading, etc. Also this is the course where doing some more reading outside the course(or at least going pretty in depth into the "5 minute" supplementary materials) really pays off, to the point of being virtually required. Everything before this course you can breeze through in less than half the time recommended, this one was a little more time consuming. Overall though if you are willing to work on your own(which you probably are if you are here) and you like to explore something you see the instructor do if it isnt explained you will feel much better about your SQL knowledge after getting through this course. The tests are still very easy.

It will always be challenging to have a an online learning course that uses an ever-changing public database. I was able to follow along with the instructor through most queries, but only if I was paying attention to what had changed. The New York Citibike dataset that we worked with often during this course, for example, has changed the name of one of the tables within that dataset. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I do remember needing to make slight changes to my queries each time we used this dataset. On the final activity where we used Austin's bikeshare data, I found that the station ID to be different than what I had been told it would be. The answer for the question in the assignment hadn't changed and was correct, but this could be confusing for some. Ultimately I understand the challenges of a static course working with something as fluid as SQL, but maybe these videos can be edited more frequently to reflect those changes?