Ratings and Reviews for Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python)

Best programming course ever.

I work in lesson design and blended learning teacher training. I train teachers how to combine effective teaching practices with technology in K-8 classrooms. There is lots of room for improvement in this course. I would not recommend it to someone with no experience. I have no experience in coding, and did well in this course because I went to other sources to answer my questions and fill the knowledge gaps in this course. Though the instructor was great. He seems very passionate. From a teaching/pedagogy standpoint the scope and sequence was poor. It went from extremely broad (defining computer parts) to hyper specific (defining variables in python) really quick. There was no information between on the practical pieces of what python is, what it looks like on our computer, and how we interact with it. It feels like multiple people got together to build the course, but after it was finished they never came back to say “Here’s where we didn’t communicate, let’s edit these things.” There is a HUGE disconnect between writing python programs and running them vs. running the actual python platform and typing commands line by line. The most frustrating thing was that every example in the course was given as a line of code in the python platform with the chevron prompt, and every single assignment was about writing a program in the text editor and the running the program. I didn’t realize these were two completely different things until about week 6. PLEASE ADDRESS THIS. Make it clear for future students that this is a thing. Go over how to use both, and the benefits and drawbacks of each. Make it clear that your examples are taking place in the command line python platform, but our homework is writing programs and saving and running them. I didn’t understand the use of the ‘type’ function until I realized this discrepancy. This was so confusing. Some of the quiz questions were very specific questions that were mentioned for about a second or never explicitly made clear. Some of the ideas that were emphasized or mentioned multiple times in the same lecture video (seemed important) were never asked on the quiz. I can give examples of both. I learned some stuff, but overall I would not recommend this course without pointing to the discrepancies. I would say there are multiple obvious areas for improvement and multiple gaps in knowledge that I filled from other sources. I could give more specific examples, but I feel like I already wrote quite a bit.

awesome experience thanks you coursera for providing such a great learning plateform

Thr podcasts doesnt not work .

excellent course

this is an excellent course! The professor is nice and the course material is really helpful. I had learned a lot from the course

Thank you for providing useful materials for who does not know any programming. I'm very interested in this course and i'm going to continue educating myself in Python which opened new window in my IT world. And special thanks for Dr. Severance who made this challenging course easy to learn and understand.

Best way to learn Python

Excellent course and great instructor. I learned Python really quick. Easy to understand and easy to apply. Great tools, great examples, great assignments. AAA+ rating.

Awesome introduction!