The course content is good while the final assignment is not related to the content or even the labs and it will be quite difficult for practitioners with non-technical background

Python Course was informative and actually ok, finished in 4 days.

HOWEVER, it then took 2 weeks to sort out "IBM issues" before I could submit coursework!!

Really dry, and the external tool they want to use gave me a "502 Bad Gateway" response. So I guess I'm not completing this course.

Too many cloud issues...

- The instruction isn’t clear, many steps are missing from the instruction, too many errors, too much time wasted in fixing error and trying to “guess” the answer or copy bits and pieces. - The grading passing score of the final assignment isn’t clear, it is not mentioned anywhere. - By reviewing the discussion forum, I see many student are failing to do the assignment, and they were given the answer straight by the instructor, I am not sure if that serve the purpose of learning/teaching ? - I found myself not understanding, not learning, and not gaining the skills I joined to gain or learn about. - The assignment estimated time is menitioned about 1 – 2 hrs, however it took me like over 40 hrs to finish, I am not disappointed that I spent much time, I am disappointed that I spent much time and I don’t feel I achieved anything other than copying and pasting codes, I haven’t learned the skills well at all. I don’t feel I am equipped to do such task in real life. I felt at the end I was more like learning how to (copy and paste) codes rather than understanding how to actually code and how code works and how to utilize Flask. - The learning curve isn’t gradual, the content is patchy and the videos jump from one subject to another without linkage in between. - Would I recommend this course? absolutely not, I feel the time I spent on the course was a complete waste as I haven’t gained any of the skills I was after gaining. I am finishing this course completely disappointed and frustrated. - If I have the chance to change something in the course, I would rather put more weight on the labs instead of leaving them simply ungraded – I don’t understand the point for putting labs if they are ungraded, how would the instructor ensure the student is going through the right process of learning? I believe adding some scoring to the labs would actually help the student learn and proof their learning progress, instead of leaving (50%) of the score weight to a final assignment that many student can’t finish, which they end up simply copying it from the instructor answer on the questions forum. - I would love to hear some advice from the instructors on how to gain the skills, in both in coding and Flask. Also, I would love to learn more about the real life coding practices, are they also about copying and pasting code without understanding how it actually works? A bit of background on myself, I have a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering, a Master’s degree in Infrastructure Engineering and Management, plus 20 years in the Civil Engineering, solving various complex problems, and went through many endless courses through my career within university and outside university. I am sorry to say that this course has by far been the worst course I have ever taken. I have decided to leave the specialization in Devops/Software Engineering also. I feel completely disappointed.

I would not recommend this course for someone who is completely new to python or programming in general, even though this is a beginner level course. Not only is the course content riddled with typos, but the text following the videos do not match at times making it hard for someone like me (a complete novice to programming) to understand the flow. There are other courses on python and data science out there that one could start with and get familiarised with the terminology first, and then sign up for this one.

Working with Jupyter workspace and IBM Cloud was also not very user friendly. There were constant errors on bucket names and endpoints while running the code, which left me confused on what was happening (I believe this was the case with other users in the course as well, as seen from the discussion threads for Week 5).

For instance, the tutorial IBM Object Storage does not clearly state which endpoint to use. For my project I ended up using an endpoint that was created in my credentials inside the JSON object. Due to this my code always gave an error. As it turns out, the correct endpoint to be used was listed elsewhere under IBM Cloud, but this was not clearly explained. I had to check with the course instructors to resolve the issue. I must say that the course instructors were very helpful in answering my questions and clarifying all my doubts promptly. I appreciated that.

In conclusion, this course is not for someone who does not have any background on programming. Get some basic experience first before coming to this one.

If a person already knew python, or at least knew OOP, this might be a course they could be reasonably expected to get through. For me, as a newcomer to OOP, it was a confusing mess. Adequate explanations aren't given. Things like f-strings are used without any explanation. No understanding of OOP or how programs are organized is given. I had to read two books and ask ChatGPT about every single item in order to understand why it is used, and why it is important. The Excel class was easy for me, because I already had a ton of experience with the program. It probably would have been equally confusing for a newcomer. What this cert program needs is an additional class on OOP to provide an overview of programming, and it needs a whole lot more 'Why?' to make sense of the 'How?' that the course teaches.

The course is kinda helpful. But please, stop using peer-review assignment. I always get deducted by some stupid or careless guys for NO SINGLE REASON! When you ask some naive students to grade another, they never give the full marks even there is no flaw in the assignment, just because they are not sure at all about any thing! Tbh, I'm kinda perfectionist. I tried my best to target 100% on every thing then finally got stuck because of others' stupidity. That made me pissed off about the whole thing that I am working on. :(

That escalated quickly

The course starts off easy and slow and you understand what you are doing. Then from 'Classes and Objects' it very hard to grasp and because I was using pycharm alongside and wanted to practice everything simultaneously, I had to google/ youtube everything taking thrice the time suggested. Also, last 5th week portion is incomprehensible when you want to actually do it practically.

This course feels like it had lots of missing links.

Course is poorly organised, even the lines of code input by default in the final assignment have issues running, not to mention that the whole project needs IBM cloud/platform support, something students do not agree to before hand.

On forums, you may see the amount of problems and difficulties of this "course", none from the IBM team replies.

Sorry, I will not be recommending this to anyone.

The instructions for the last assignment are absolute garbage and the last project as a whole is mostly a waste of time when it comes to learning Python and data science. Despite errors and use of depreciated functions, the course was otherwise great but the last project's instructions and overall design is awful enough to undo the rest.

The professor does not explain anything well or provide details of how things work. It tries to focus on making things seem non-intimidating and easy instead of explaining them well. Chuck Severance's Python for Everybody is much better than this garbage and it is FREE. Why am I paying for this trash again?

Horrible. Forced to use IBM Cloud and IBM Watson for assignments. Typos in instructions and not enough information in Week 5 material. Very poorly organized and i would not recommend this course because of how much time I had to spend trouble-shooting IBM Watson/Cloud which I have no intention on using.

All I can say is that I passed this course knowing nothing about Python. Is too basic, and nothing is clear probably I'd have learned more in a $9.99 Udemy course. The half of it IBM try to sell you it's tools.

I hope next courses of the "IBM Data Analyst" certificate are better

This course is awful. The information is pretty basic and really doesn't teach you python at all. At the end of the course they hand you an assignment with coding that is way over your head and when it error's out you don't know how to solve the issue.

The course content is very good until you get to the final peer graded assignment which is very unclear what to do and how to tackle and you're left alone to tackle a ton of errors that are mostly irrelevant to what you're learning

IBM should be ashamed of issuing such a patchy-mess up and chaotic material using its brand. Google data analytics course is way better in case you want to actually learn at leas something regarding data analysis / data science.

so many issues with Watson STudio and IBM storage. No help from the instructors or Coursera! wasted so much time on finding solutions . Please go to threads and you would get to know every student was facing the same issue

The exercises were few and mainly required copy-paste instead of understanding. Also, the course was full of ads for IBM. Finally, there were spelling mistakes throughout the text, which is just unprofessional.

Do not waste you money. There is no even a place to ask question if you are not sure. They create a forum which is totally useless as nobody answers your questions when you stuck!

I have wasted a lot of time in learning how to save and upload the data on ibm platform rather than actually learning python. There should be other methods to submit our work.

Weeks 4 & 5 are overwhelming for beginners. I stopped my whole Data Analyst Certification because that course is total waste of time. Wouldn't expect that from IBM.

You take more time trying to get to work the IBM products than actually learning python. This is specially salient in the peer-graded assingment

Don't take it. No Course Instructors, no help. Not worth the money...

Even the Working Platform is always timing out or has a gateway error.

A course recommendation for the devs:

https://www.coursera.org/lecture/writing-for-children/introduction-to-editing-and-proofreading-qtC7p