Ratings and Reviews for Introduction to Data Science in Python

Good

old and fucked up

I really think this course is taking you from the very basic to the most complex scenarios. I think the Graded Assignments are of the bests I have encountered. They are challenging, easy to handle and when you hit the pass score is the best feeling ever.

I rarely wrote reviews. However, I want to express that the assignments of this course is really poorly designed. First, they are much more challenging and difficult than the lecture content. Basically you need to learn by yourself. Second, they often consist of multiple questions sharing basically the same codes yet needs extra effort of meaningless repetitive data leaning work. So time-consuming and effort-taking. I indeed learned something in this process, but to get an "introduction" certificate for all the time and efforts is not a very good deal.

BEST COURSE

This course is not useful. The instructor is just reading through a script at a high pace and not actually teaching the material. Some concepts that are shown for the first time, and are extremely complicated, are just glossed over, and you are told by the instructor to go to stackoverflow or elsewhere to figure out how the piece of code is working. This results in the assignment portions of the course taking an exceptional amount of time to complete. After completing the excellent PY4E course from Dr. Chuck Severance, also at University of Michigan, this course gave me whiplash. You are better off just reading through Wes McKinney's Python for Data Analysis book.

The programme is simply not designed to help you learn but more about offloading informatoin in a very quick and unstructured way. The fact that it does not teach you to set up jupyter notebook in your local environment means that it does not even want you to access learning materials on local drive. This is not conducive to learning.

I had high hopes for this course after taking Python for Everybody Specialization with Dr. Chuck. The structure of this course, while intended to be hands-on, lacked depth and instead felt like the material was being read from a script. After taking the Py4E specialization, working on several projects, I feel comfortable building what is required by this course, but even for someone with an intermediate level of Python knowledge, it's impossible to keep up with the speed at which the material is being displayed. The Jupyter Notebook method is silly... especially having to use split screen on a 16" laptop and expecting students to follow along when the instructor casually cruises through each line of material. Not to mention, you can't even see the material that is being inserted into Jupyter on their end because it uses half the screen that is already split in half (just imagine trying to read microscopic text help at arms length from your eyes while being expected to follow along. I had to resort to screencasting the lecture from my phone to my TV, and even then, it wasn't possible to follow along. I have never taken a college-level course that presents material in this manner, and I have a Master's degree. This course would be elevated entirely if even the slightest amount of lecture material were tpo be displayed in slides, maybe then include an engaging activity in Jupyter for the students. In addition, having a background that includes people working is distracting. Use a professional, black background? Also, less hand gestures would help people focus on what is being talked about. I was more focused on the flaring hands that the words coming out at mach 5. I really tried to get through the intro course, just because it was needed for the Specialization. I hope Coursera takes action to change the material presentation.

Useful content but the assignments were too ambiguous

This course content is great, but the organization is abysmal. The material is presented in large information dumps, with very few practice exercises sprinkled within only some of the video lectures. The Jupyter Notebooks are not organized in sync with the lectures, and it is unclear how/where the exercises in the notebooks concur with the video lectures. There is no organized way to practice along side the material presented in the lectures.