Good

This course has appealing assignments and covers interesting topics. The course, however, has two fatal flaws. First, the lectures are a bit disjointed. While there is much to learn in the lectures, the lecturers style is a bit halting and scattered (it would have been much better presented if the lecturer had a script to read off of.) As is, the lectures are mediocre, which is unfortunate since the lecturer is clearly knowledgeable about the topics presented.

Second, the assignments suffer from a lack of good error messaging and no support in the forums (aside from what you will find from other students, which can be very helpful at times.) The assignments themselves are a great approach to learning concepts (and you get to work with real data, like the Twitter data), but without good error messaging when you submit a script you pretty much end guessing where you are taking a wrong turn.

I had high hopes for this course, but it seems as though it fails on execution.

Overall I enjoyed this course and got a broad overview of the various technologies used in big data analysis. The course is video heavy but short on practice. There are 3 assignments the first 3 weeks, then week4 is an endless series of videos. I really enjoyed the assignments but felt there should have been more assessment/practice provided -there are no quizzes to reinforce understanding. The readings provided are mostly academic ones which aren't that clear to beginners (even to programmers like me).

In contrast, a Python data science course on another MOOC platform has 4 times as much content with practice exercises after every video, mid and final exams, weekly problem sets as well as readings.

Ultimately the course showed me what I need to learn next to get into Data Science but the first course hasn't given me confidence that the rest of the specialization will be worth the money.

The lectures are all just the right length. As a working professional, it was easy to consume the course in my varying bits of free time. For the most part, the assignments were good. There were a few places where there were mistakes in the instructions or the code downloaded from github had some errors. It was fairly clear that these mistakes have been around for quite sometime, so I wonder why nobody ever bothered to update the code in github or update the bad instructions. This is the internet, not a published textbook. That should be pretty easy to fix. It was also a little disappointing that the 4th lesson was extra long in terms of lectures and had no related assignments. The course was marked as completed when I finished the 3rd assignment so the fourth lesson was effectively optional.

Pros: The content of the course is great. It introduces fundamentals of big data technologies to those who are new to this field, with some hands-on practices.

Cons: The instructions of assignments are not always clear - they are corrected in the discussion forum but why not updating in the assignment page? Usage of Python 2.7 is also somewhat out of date since it's 2019.

Biggest con: The way the lecturer talks is more than annoying. Full of stop words like 'fine', 'ok', with occasionally correcting mistakes on slides or diverging to other topics - there are only a few minutes each video and how much time did the lecturer wasted on talking nonsense? It's fine if he talks like that on some 90-min-long classes but it's on Coursera. Sometimes I just skimmed the slides rather than listen to him.

Lots of good material, though I don't like how they've repackaged the original material from the prior longer version, which I worked through at my own pace a year ago, off session. Cramming all the material relating to NoSQL and Graph Analytics into the final week without assignment is ineffective. Instead, consider focusing the 4th week on NoSQL, and keep an assignment with it, maybe even the original Pig assignment that required and AWS account. I don't think the nominal charge Amazon will levy would hold anybody up who's serious about learning to process data at scale, it's just a few bucks.

Somehow interesting course about Data analysis. The lectures are interesting for those who have no prior knowledge about the topics, but boring to those who have it. The assignments are quite challenging and the disadvantage is, that they are not connected to the lectures and are therefore not well explained. What I like about the assignments is, that it is practical.

Found the assignments were 'very loosely' aligned with the lecture material and had poorly formed problems in places.

Lectures were reasonably good but not quite up to the standard set with other U of W Data Science courses or other University Data Science / Machine Learning courses I have taken.

The emphasis on methods rather than specific tools makes the course more resistant to the continuous changes in technology. The stage is set well, and there are practical implementations. Still, it's disappointing to see that errors from previous rounds have not been corrected.

It was really frustrating that the autograder and assignment instructions didn't match. This course has been around too long for that big of a mistake. The lectures were the redeeming factor. They were interesting and presented the subject matter in a concise way.

the material is too simple. This course is just like a brief introduction, but not a course in college to teach student the real knowledge. I think MOOC course should be the same as a real college course. With the same difficulty and amount of material.

Good content for Data Scientists but video lessons are not sufficient to be able to complete the assignments. It required great deal of own searching and trials and errors to complete the course.

This is a cooked up version from an earlier, more extensive course. Lecture videos now split from 10-14 minutes into lots of 4-6 minute videos. It seems, some assignments are missing, too.

Good information but lectures were poorly produced and unedited and exercise instructions were blatantly incorrect several times.

A couple of comments in the forums were very old and it seemed nobody had been checking the course for a long time.

Long, slow, rambling video. I watched most of it at 1.75x. Slides are kind of a mess and lectures are disorganized.

little touch of everything， it's good intro for non-tech， but way too shallow for a student from tech background

Program instructions could be more specific. Make it clear exactly what format the programs output should be.

The material is good. If you can get past the instructor's mumbling and rapid speaking then you'll be okay.

Assignments were just not that challenging except first one

Interesting but outdated

This course, which sounds promising in title and syllabus, has many glaring deficiencies. In fact, I feel terrible if anyone ponied up $100+ for it. It roughly covers some concepts of data science, but never at scale, and never very clearly. My background is a science Ph.D. with a lot of computational science experience.

The lectures: Clearly poorly planned. Bill Howe has some knowledge about databases, but little skill in communicating it. The organizational structure leaves much to be desired. Much of the lectures are broad-brush and halting, simultaneously being too detailed as times and not broad enough at other times. Technical portions are marked by a number of errors in speaking and on the slides, as well as a lot of hesitation and jargon. It's as if he neither thought about the structure of what he wanted to say or a script of what he might say prior to recoding the session. Phoning in it is an apt description.

The Assignments: The first assignment with Twitter was fun and interesting and gets the course 2 stars instead of one. The lectures prior to this will not prepare you for the assignment though, so might as well just skip them and do it on your own. The SQL assignment followed a set of lectures in which no proper discussion of SQL was ever given. The last assignment on Map-Reduce is acceptable although a number of errors in the homeworks are still uncorrected long after the first offering of this course. The autograder's idea of helpful feedback is similar to "Incorrect value. Try again" Week 4 of this course, which contains a vast amount of information has no exercises at all.

Overall, this class is the polar opposite of a quality online course like Andrew Ng's Machine Learning Course. Do the twitter assignment and skip the rest. Lectures are poor and assignments are well below average. If I were at UW, this is not the kind of course I'd want representing my university in a public setting.

This course is quite outdated. I didn't learn much beyond what I already knew before I started. The Spark courses from edX are way better than these. Hopefully "Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark" from the "École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne" (also from Coursera) is good (I know their Scala courses, which are taught by Martin Odersky, are quite good).

There are very few quizzes between lectures and the assignments are not very challenging.

Many of the videos, specially the ones at the end were extremely rushed over. They serve more as a review if you know the subject, otherwise I don't think most people will get much from them.

The audio isn't very good for most of the lectures, many having an very annoying chirping sound (from when you leave an old flip phone near a computer... "teh-teh-teh teh-teh-teh teh-teh-teh teh-tehhhhhh....". Gosh, I haven't heard this sound in maybe over five years...).

Good focus on ideas vs principles. The focus on relational algebra is a great way to look at data manipulation in general. Unfortunately, relational algebra is explained quite well, but not really applied after that. This could be a great course if it really taught to constantly think in terms of relational algebra.

Okay-ish explanations of databases and hadoop. Not very deep and not always structured, but rather focused on the technology principles instead of the data principles.

I think that this specialisation suffers the same problem most data science/mining/analytics courses suffer: it ignores the non-technical starting point: scientific or business relevance. How does one organise data, get to know completely new data, understand possible value? i.e. how to start a data science project if all there is is unorganised data and the wish to do 'something' with it.