Ratings and Reviews for Python Project: Software Engineering and Image Manipulation

This course is uterly confusing. The Jupyter environment isn't explained clearly. Installation instruction videos leave out steps and don't work. Some videos show only the instructor with no on-screen view of what he is doing, leaving me baffled as to what he is talking about. The first assignment isn't clear. I don't even know what I'm doing with the Jupyter notebook yet and I come to an assignment that lacks clear instructions. The other classes in the specialization I'm trying to complete were superb. This course is the opposite. Total lack of clarity and impossible to finish. A waste of time to try due to errors in the instructions videos. Please take this class out of the specialization or refund my money. Very dissapointed in UM for putting this course into the specialization, blocking me from obtaining the certificate.

In my opinion, this ranks as one of the most abysmal courses I have taken either online or in person. Not because of the course content which is highly interesting and a final assignment which is very challenging but the way the course was conducted, spearheaded by an inept instructor and an apathetic staff support assistant. Plus its disjointed placement as the last course in the Python 3 Programming Specialization This is the culmination course in the Python3 Programming Specialization and has very little connection to the previous four courses which were taught by instructors who were enthusiastic, empathetic and incredibly good at delivering the lecture content supplemented with great assignments and an excellent interactive textbook. After you complete the first four courses in this specialization and you think you are reaching the finish line, you get sprayed with a blast of shotgun fire in this last course. In this last course we have an instructor whose idea of pedagogy is presenting a set of code and content in Jupyter notebooks and parroting those notes. And you have a staff member who, instead of giving encouragement to students and responding to their questions responds with statistics on how many times a question has been answered and rambles on around the original question without directly answering the question. The final project is a total disaster and not one worthy of being included in an MOOC. There are multiple bugs in the instructions, no help from any source. This is the type of project that should be given to students attending Go Blue in person with supporting resources such as Grad Assistant tutors and the instructor himself. Instead we are told what packages to import and then do everything ourselves. The first four courses do not prepare you for this poor excuse for a final course. I have decades of programming experience both as a faculty member and a lifelong student and I was therefore able to complete the programming assignment which is replete with coding and execution problems. The execution times are enormous – anywhere from 15+ minutes for a single run which means that debugging is a nuisance. In my humble and honest opinion, this course appears to be included in this specialization to enable the course instructor the opportunity to get some enrollment and earn some bucks from the hapless students who have completed the first four courses and feel it incumbent to complete the specialization. If it were a stand-alone course, I doubt he would have many takers. Computer Vision and Recognition are specialized areas. This is a course that needs to be under the umbrella of another specialization. It is not meant for learners who start the specialization with no prior or little programming experience as stated at the time of start of the specialization. On another matter, when I was peer-grading the assignments, I found that 90+% of the submissions were plagiarized code which I flagged. Out of the 15 assignments I attempted to peer-grade I found only two that had original content. Never, in any online course have I encountered such numbers. This clearly indicates that the students were desperate to complete the specialization and resorted to submitting plagiarized code. The faculty at UM should discuss this more fundamental problem and ask themselves why such a situation is prevalent. No one connected with this course seems to give a damn about this. This course is a dismal mark to an otherwise elite university and its great faculty and a revelation on how terrible an instructor and his pedagogy can be. It is a travesty to the thousands of students, some from poor countries, who have enrolled in this specialization and paid fees with their hard-earned money.

Badly put together

The last course in the Python 3 Programming specialization provides an opportunity to bring together all the concepts that were taught in the previous courses and apply them to real world problems. This course is more hands-on, and teaches how to approach problems and find solutions from using libraries and other tools "in the wild". Excellent programming assignment at the end!

This was really something. We learned how to learn on our own and experiment with third-party APIs. Thanks Michigan and Coursera

Very good course. Challenging and fun.

The last course is obviously made mindlessly. And its quality is lower than the others. Making shame on coursera and Michigan

This course is actually not too bad, except that it can be quite strenuous to debug the code for the final project when it is slow to run certain third party library functions. It is certainly challenging, given that the first four courses in this specialization might have spoiled you with detailed instruction and easy assessment tasks. But don't forget that this course is flagged as 'intermediate level' instead for 'beginner's level' (frankly, the fourth course, which is also flagged as 'intermediate', is not up to the mark in comparison with other 'intermediate' courses on Coursera -- it should have been flagged as 'beginner'). That being said, if I were the instructor, I might want to smooth the learning curve though. I found a lot of negative comments in the comment section before I actually took the course, so I was a little bit worried. But in general, I did learn a lot from this course and enjoy the process of tackling the challenging final project. Therefore, I reckon it is a useful and inspiring course if you do actually invest time in it. Good luck!

I think 3 stars may have been a bit generous. I've now earned 12 certificates in Coursera and this has been my least favourite so far. The instructor was clearly very knowledgable but very little explanation of concepts, or alternative approaches was offered. While final assignment, which covered OCR and Face detection, was very interesting to me personally, it didn't seem to have much to do with the rest of the specialisation and should probably be a standalone course for those interested in digital photography etc. A big anti-climax to finish off an otherwise excellent specialisation.

This course challenges students to apply what they learned in the specialization. However, I thought the final project could have been designed better (it was purposefully vague). I would have liked a better description of what to develop. Instead, instructors choose to use hints and forums to guide students.