Not really impressed with these courses so far...

programme structure is hard, teaching way is old

Assignments are too hard comparing to lessons

Morely designed on slideshows, not effective.

exercises given don't follow the course line

This course is very difficult for beginners.

This course is not very "beginner friendly"

it's so hard for beginners in my opinion

Not engaging and not presented well.

Pretty advanced and little guidance.

Peng is incomprehensible. I give up.

This is not beginner R Programming.

Assignments were way too difficult

Instructor is not so satisfactory

Need to cover basics of OOP more

final assessment was though

the assignment is too hard

Not what i was looking for

difficult for beginners

No easy explanations

very old material.

I really cannot recommend this course for lack of its structure but as I have decided to do the specialization now I cannot stop. Quizzes are good and test the depth of concepts we understood in lectures but programming assignment fails everything. It feels like lectures are made by a person and assignments by a completely new person with a lack of communication. A strong suggestion from being new to programming is that consider the lectures as per the assignments you have made. Programs required to complete the assignments include functions that have not been covered in the lectures nor have they been provided in any supplemental or suggested reading. Assignments are mean to implement what we have learned in the lectures and readings. But the codes required to complete the assignments either have not been taught or mentioned with good references. People with prior programming experience can adapt to it but me being new to it struggled a lot. Especially on week 3 and week 4 programs. I literally had to do filter and sort data in excel to be able to answer some questions in the programming assignments. Please refer course on "Strategic Leadership and Management" by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Coursera. There is such an amazing interrelation among assignments and teaching that it makes you want to go further and also try to read or work around more. Please first consider the assignment you want students to complete and then design the lectures. For the week 3 program, I learned after lots of googles to use the argument 'pattern' in the read.csv function. It's really frustrating to solve those programs without a proper understanding of functions. I hope you make the changes as after completing this course even we can utilize it.

Thank you for your efforts.

I would not recommend this course to anyone. I enrolled in this course because I am familiar with statistical analysis and wanted to become more adept at using R, and this course was very disappointing.

The lecture material and practice assignments in Swirl are nice, but they leave you totally unprepared to complete the quizzes and assignments. There is a massive leap in difficulty from the practice assignments and lectures to the quizzes and programming assignments. Going back over the lectures, practice assignments, and textbook will provide only minor assistance for assignments - there is not enough information to complete the assignment.

Because the course resources are inadequate, students must spend hours Googling and troubleshooting in order to finish assignments. An article posted on the course discussion board claims that this is due to the creators wanting to instill a "hacker mentality" in students, so they will work to find the answers themselves.

While I agree that students should not be spoon-fed the answers, this is a course that charges an admission fee. I took this course because I was looking for resources to learn - if I wanted to spend hours searching random corners of the internet for the answers to R programming questions, I could've done that on my own time at no charge. I feel like I took a basic anatomy course and the first test required me to safely remove someone's appendix.

In short, do not take this class.

If you are planning to learn R, then go and buy a book. This course is a complete scam. At least don't pay any money. The reasons;

1.) They advertise that you need couple of hours of study per week. That's a lie, you have to study much more than that unless if you know a little R programming.

2.) The quiz questions are totally unrelated from the lessons. They teach you the basic stuff but they expect you to accomplish intermediate quizzes.

3.) The instructor has no idea how to teach. May be he is trying to prove something. I couldn't really understand his motives. If you really want to teach that's simple. You do couple of extra videos and teach whatever you are asking in quizzes, or tell us to read a certain material. He didn't do any of them which means he either doesn't know how to teach or this specialization is a complete scam.

4.) And I don't really understand what coursera is doing by the way? What kind of a business model is this. I was planning to enroll many specializations but now I am not going to do it. So think about how much they are loosing. Where is the quality assurance. Just because one guy comes up to you and say that he teaches this and that do you believe them?

MY ADVICE TO YOU: DON'T PAY ANYTHING FOR THIS SPECIALIZATION. AND FOR ANY OTHER COURSE READ THE BAD REVIEWS FIRST (WHICH WAS MY MISTAKE).

The materials in this course are very poorly thought out. (Content of lectures does not match quizzes and assignments, for example. This is obviously intentional, as what the course calls hacking skills is emphasized. By this they mean googling things and figuring stuff out on your own. However, this course gets you barely a step above buying a book on Amazon and just having at it. Yes, the course is nearly free, but your time is valuable.) For example, the unit on missing values explains NA and NaN, but does not mention complete.cases, which is the one you need for the assignment. It's only like a 5 minute video, so why not cover that as well?

Worse than that, the assignments and quizzes are deliberately designed to trip you up. You will think you have fulfilled the assignment and then when you get to the quiz you realize that you cannot answer the question using the code you wrote because now you are being required to add extra bells and whistles. This process is demoralizing and is obviously intended to make the learner feel as though they are at fault for struggling, when in fact at no time is the learner informed that the educational materials provided are intentionally insufficient.

Underlying all of this is a weed-them-out educational philosophy that really has no place in the 21st century.