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

The instructor doesn't explain it well. Most of the stuff just goes above the head. The final assigment is a joke.

The first 4 courses were like really good, awesome actually. The problem is the 5th one. I think it was a mess due to the following reasons: -There were uncorrected mistakes that seemed to be there for like several months or even a year without solving. -The submission system for the final project was a nightmare and the Notepad++ solution they gave us was not working at all (I saw other students complaining about this in the forums). I had to copy my code several lines at a time to ensure that it would not lose formatting and checking that it had the correct indentation at each moment. Even then, after ensuring that everything was alright and seeing my own submission, there were some lines that were not formatted correctly even if I did input them correctly. I had to put a disclaimer to say that it was not my fault if the indentation was not the correct one. This situation has been going on for months and action has not been taken. This is unacceptable. -We were required to execute someone else's code for review in our own environment. I could only copy and paste another fellow student's code for review when using Microsoft Edge (Chrome and Firefox did not do the trick). -The staff moderating the forums was not really helpful. I asked about how to download a file that could not be download through the environment, but he would not say that the pinned posts in the forum were intended to help. Normally you do not expect to have that many errors in your course material, so it is normal to NOT expect that many tips to be available in the forums. -Each iteration of the code is like really low execute. The instructor claims that the big file in the final assignment took like 10 minutes to process, but that is far from reality. This leads to my next point. -The theoretical contents have not been clear and useful. We were told that certain things could be done to improve processing of the image, but none of it seemed to actually make anything better. For instance, when we applied the bounding boxes to the OCR, it did not seem to actually improve anything. What is more, it made OCR to work worse. -One of the parameters that were needed to make the pyteseract module correctly was not explained during the course. I would get really bad results over and over until I found one of the parameters and set it to a reasonable value. Even if the course is based on kraken, pyteseract and OpenCV, it is maybe a bit ambitious to expect the student to try and use those parameters, one of them without even mentioning it in the lectures. It would be understandable if the material provided was much faster to compute, but exploring two parameters, each with its own set of values is a really time consuming process. -It feels like most of the content in the lectures is junk and only 10% of that is really useful in the assigment. The other 90% actually makes things worse (as I said previously some recommended techniques did not work) and is presented in a convoluted way. I had this sensation many times during my university years, were the classes would be totally disconnected from the exam and with real practice. You feel like the lectures have been a total loss of time. I consider this bad teaching practice. I expected more from a university in the USA.

Great material but final assignment didn't seem well thought out nor tested. It was also required a much harder skill level than required in the rest of the 5 course series Python 3 Programming.

This last course of 'Python 3 Specialisation' is very different and the quality doesn't match the other 4 courses. In this one are plenty of faults, some not solved for long time (according to the comments in the discussions). If I would experience this quality in the beginning of a training, I would immidatly cancel the assignment.

The training seemed to have no bearing with the other courses in the Python 3 specialization. The lectures were not structured, not to mention the projects that were extremely difficult, in comparison to the lectures provided. It totally dampened my enthusiasm for the certification.

I had a hard time following all the Week 1 instructions to get my machine set up with all the appropriate software, packages, and example files/notebooks. After really getting stuck and reviewing the Discussion Forums, it became very clear to me that this course is not complete yet. I'm dropping out, as I don't want to spend weeks trying to decipher the path forward and waiting for support while getting charged $50/month.

Challenging for beginners need to take more time to explain things.

I really liked the content and its presentation. The knowledge conveyed in this course is useful, the teaching staff does a good job, and the final project is legitimately interesting. If you aim only for knowledge and don't care about the certification, go aheas, you will not regret it. The reason this is not 5 stars is the very, very end - the submission procedure for the final project. It involves pasting Python source code into a Coursera text field. This kills the Python formatting, and thus the code becomes unrunnable. Workarounds have been suggested, but did not work for me (and at least a few others). It is completely beyond me why this method of submission was chosen. The course creators themselves use a way better method earlier in the course (html export of Jupyter notebook). Why is this worth a 2 star deduction? Because it means that people may pay for this and aim for a certification, and could fail at the very end for reasons they have zero control over.

Very nice course for beginner to understand python.

Submitting the last project was so hard. The workaround provided did not work for me.