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

The previous 4 courses were so much fun solely due to how the assignments were structured. This assignment however was filled with so many issues along the way. Firstly, computing image data takes a considerable amount of time, throw in face recognition modules like opencv and it becomes even harder. I have a few things I liked and did not like about this particular course: What I liked: 1) The fact that the week 1 assignment was so intuitive and yet challenging actually kept me hooked on to this course and finish this specialization. 2) There are a lot of real-world applications with the content shared in this course. This happens to be the most (at least for me) practical course in the entire mega course for python. 3) This course offered a fairly good amount of interaction with the Jupyter notebooks. What I don't like: 1) The week 1 assignment was actually fun and challenging at the same time but, the hints provided for this assignment were little to no help. I'm sure there are better ways to make students read the docs more but, this shouldn't be one of those methods. 2) The week 3 assignment was probably the most annoying assignment of this entire course. The assignment looks fairly easy but, the entire code takes over 20 minutes just to execute. This can be a real issue when you're dealing with experimenting with images and image data. 3) The files for this assignment were not readily available for use. I found out that they had the assets up for download in a separate thread which was not even pinned when it is so important. 4) The notebook was taking so damn long that I decided to install Jupyter and work on my local machine with those files. This was a great improvement over the Coursera Jupyter notebook, though the video guide on how to install and setup Jupyter is outdated. 5) After spending a ridiculous amount of time coding this assignment, when the time came for submission, it was an even bigger pain. The assignment requires you to post the code to a text field but, this text fields removes and destroys all the indenting and formatting. I spent hours on end trying to format it correctly before restoring to uploading my code to online codeshare platforms like GitHub. 6) The review process is even more difficult. You would have to run the peer's code and cross-examine their results. This was a huge pain since running the code can take anywhere from 20 - 40 minutes to complete. I hope the team takes this feedback constructively and uses the above-mentioned points to help improve upon those aspects.

Course seems to be incomplete. I had a lot of issues doing the projects due the lack of information.

Now here is the thing, this last course is basically: Here are these third party libraries and their documentations, use them to do this make this program. On one hand, yes. This is meant to be one last hard test for your Python knowledge. On the Other hand, you do not really learn anything from here. You will find yourself surfing stackoverflow and github. I mean, I guess this is kind of the point ?... But It is kind of frustrating and annoying, and after searching the web you end up cutting and pasting most of the code and not writing much, if any, yourself anyways. I can see the point of this course, I really do, But I believe it is in a grave need of redesign. Please bare in mind that most people end up here mainly for the specialization certificate and kind of expect some sort of reward for their hard work in the previous courses. And there is not enough info here for most people to try and brute-force it on their on, which ends in the inevitable dreaded search -copy - paste Algorithm.

Very reach and useful. The project is pretty hard and requires more knowing use python, that it outside the scope of this course

Excellent course to learn about python libraries and how to implement them in your projects.

According to my experience, the first 4 courses are pretty good but the last one not so good

This course was not designed well from a pedagogical standpoint. I learned a ton, which was the main goal, but it was brutal and so tedious that it kind of tainted the Specialization for me. It wasn't because it was difficult -- I appreciated that. It was the fact the instructor literally reads (without inflection or emotion) the lectures to you, as the text scrolls across the screen. It would be better without him reading. I like reading. I hate being read to. (Apologies to my daughter.) Also, some of the lessons are neat but redundant and don't really build on each other. The two assignments are difficult and challenging, and I LOVED that! The problem was, it took me forever to get through the content, because of the annoying being read to. If possible, I recommend recreating this. Get rid of the videos. Have brief introduction videos at the start of the modules, and then just let students read through the module Jupyter Notebooks. The reading is horrible!!! It's not necessarily the instructor's fault. I'm not bashing him. It's just bad pedagogy. Thanks, though, for challenging me. If this had been a cakewalk, I would have given it 1 Star. This course had the most challenging assignments in all of the specialization. That was great.

really nice course to get started on computer vision

A little unclear about how to get our hands wet on these libraries. The notebook environment keeps having bugs that slow down the learning process.

Easily the weakest course of the specialization, but still very strong. Very project/independent oriented, so be prepared to work in this one. Final project submission is not well implemented. Coursera should fix the horrid text box.