Good course!!!

The teachers were smart and funny, and I enjoyed trying out the tools (some new to me, others not). These people clearly knew their stuff and I got the impression they wanted everyone taking the course to know and use it as well.

The tests and labs were really lacking though. The tests simply required looking for verbatim quotes in the material and the labs were, somehow, both confusing and hand-holding. Baffling to me.

This course is more like a Watson Studio ad than a data science course. A bit about R studio, Jupiter Notebook and GitHub and sooooo long (and actually hard to understand unless you are already a datascientist and just looking for a convinient tool) videos about Watson Studio tools.

Needs some updates to match new formats for IBM Watson Studio. Also, this course skipped over basic code theory and functions, and tried to overcome that by just describing buttonology needed to make the programs operate. Not even close to good enough.

The course was overall OK. Several lessons were either too advanced and required previous knowledge about the subject or the audio was terrible. Nonetheless, one learns a few things in this course. But definitely not one of the best.

Useful overview of tools. Following the tutorials was frustrating as the demonstrations did not match what is now available. Got there with a fair amount of frustration and swearing! The assignment was fun though.

courseware is outdated, I was having issues understanding how to create project in IBM Watson, while video explains how to do it in IBM data science experience.

The course in watson studios contains videos the were too outdated and didn't really help understand how to use the platform as it is nowadays.

Some of the Watson Studio videos are confusing because they are recorded on the previous version and they don't match anymore.

The material seems out of dated and it takes a lot of effort to try to find a region that finally accepts registration.

Videos and instructions do not sync with new IBM Watson Studio.

This is perhaps one of the worst courses I've taken on Coursera, if not in the past 20 years of my life. The first week starts out as just listing a million different tools, using technical jargon only suitable for people who already have experience in the field. Why would THEY need to take this course? Once you finally process all that information, take copious notes, and do a ton more online research, then there are some good introductions to Jupyter Notebooks, R studio, and github that are very easy to follow. Overall, there are some people from IBM who contributed to this course and did a good job, but others who just "turned in the assignment last minute" without really having an idea or concept of "how to teach". This course should have had more examples of REAL use cases. They should really learn from Microsoft Azure's training videos that have real people, real data scientists talking about real use cases in the REAL world, instead of having a voice over actor read some dense material, they should really be interviewing experts. This is hands down the worst course in the whole series and only gave it 2 stars because I still managed to learn very useful stuff (Jupyter notebooks, installing anaconda, Visual Code Studio, R, RStudio, and setting up and understanding basics of Github)

This seemed like more of a sales pitch for IBM products than a course. Also, it covered products such as IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog that have been discontinued. Overall the course seems outdated.

Many of the questions on the quizzes don't ask for actual knowledge, they just ask for knowing the correct names of different products. Questions are sometimes worded vaguely and almost impossible to answer (e.g. asking an "either or" question and then offering only "Yes" or "No" as the choices).

Finally, the final assignment was a joke. They require you to take, save and then upload eleven individual screenshots of individual cells in a Jupyter notebook. This takes forever and it's completely unnecessary since you also provide the entire notebook in a public GitHub repo. It's just a waste of time and disrespectful of the learner. They also don't make it clear whether you should screenshot the cells as raw code, or after they are executed. On top of that, the assignment itself is facile; you're just supposed to copy and paste some markup and do a few simple arithmetic operations.

Very confusing course. It states that it is beginner level, but since the first lesson there is a lot of technical jargon that is difficult to understand if you have no background in the subject matter. There is an overload of content taught and it makes everything quite difficult to comprehend and follow for an absolute beginner. The "Watson Studio" section felt like an advert, and when having to do the assignments the platform didn't really work properly. The videos explain everything on an older and outdated version of Watson Studios, and it took me ages to try to figure things out. In the end I wasn't even able to do the exercises because the use of Watson Studios as requested required entering credit card details and a payment plan.

I did learn some interesting things, and I enjoyed the more practical exercises on GitHub and Jupyter, but overall I don't think that the course is destined for the right audience and the contents could be a lot clearer.

It is a decent introduction to some of the tools and platforms used in data science. Very basic introduction to python and R, along with IDEs like Jupyter and RStudio.

The last part of the course is (understandably) about IBM Watson Studio, and this is where my problem starts. I could activate an IBM cloud account, despite having past credit cart etc checks. Asking for assistance to the email address provided in the error message, I received zero information. I was told that (and I quote) "no further information will be disclosed regarding this matter." Then they deactivated my account and barred me from reactivating it.

Yeah, all in all the course started decent but ended by making me feel like a criminal. Thanks.

A frustrating course that uses a lot of programming terms without explaining them. I got through it by just assuming we'd learn more in later courses and thanks to a little bit of computer knowledge, but it would have been helpful to have a secton on what the languages are, what's Spark, what kernels are, etc, for beginners. Also annoying that the tools have changed since the videos were made, so, for instance, Watson Studio looks quite different than the old tool in the video, so it's hard to figure out where to start a project.

Very meager overview of tools. No explanation of what you are doing, videos are outdated, no explanation of the differences between the tools (when do you choose which tools), system was down for a long time, links are not working correctly. It looks as if this module was made years ago and then systems developed but the course was never updated. Course leaders is not working anymore for IBM already for more than a year. IBM you can do better!

Some information is not updated and a huge amount of time is lost in trying to figure out how to do simple things just because of the platform they are telling you to use. However, you can find useful information in the forums as all students have similar problems. I would just recommend this course to users who do not know tools such as Jupyter notebooks already.

The second week of this course is so confusing and difficult to follow I almost dropped it. The third and fourth week were much better organized. The second week should be deleted from this course, it was not helpful at all.

Many parts feel like an advertisement for IBM. Screen shots and lab instructions don't match clearly with the current workflow for online tools. Some of the quiz questions are very unclear in their wording and intent.

A clear explanation of every tool required. Too advanced for beginners in data science.

These materials should be updated to the current Watson work environment

the videos about Watson lab are out of date.

AVOID!! Complete disaster of a course. Probably the worst online course I've ever come across

This course exists almost entirely to funnel users into IBM’s expensive IBM Cloud suite. You CANNOT complete the course and get the certificate without signing up to it. From what I can gather this used to be offered free to all students but that is no longer the case. I spent 3 days trying to create an account, and sent a number of emails and forums posts but with no luck.

The support lines are completely useless. Once you sign up and go to the forums you will see thousands of angry users asking for access to the IBM Cloud suite and the moderators just ignore them. I trying signing up using the paid version but that didn’t work. When I queried with IBM, they responded telling me there was nothing they can do and that they will not allow me to sign up to their platform. Thus it is impossible for me to complete the course.

Aside from that the course quality is very poor, with outdated materials (all of with are either walls of text or powerpoint presentations) and endless lists that you are expected to memorise, rather than actually being required to understand the content. I had to watch most videos multiple times because I drifted off during them.

I expected more from Coursera and IBM. Will avoid this platform in future. I feel like I wasted weeks of my life on this course.

I'm very disappointed by these courses. I'm not sure if the other courses are going to be similar but so far the courses has been filled with unexplained jargon and lessons where the instructor is working on a dataset that isn't provided in advance. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be finding these datasets on my own before but I have no idea where to find the exact dataset the instructors are using.

From my understanding, these are supposed to be introductory courses which should mean that they take the time teach you on a granular level about what they are talking about. Instead, instructors teach as if you should already know the technical terms and don't explain anything. They walk you through what you're supposed to do without explaining the reasoning or what the process is achieving. It feels like they don't really care about the depth of the education.

Feeling kind of ripped off. I really hope that the rest of the courses are not like the first two courses.