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

This course was a real disappointment when compared with the other courses in the Python 3 Programming specialisation. Steve and Paul were EXCELLENT in the first 4 courses, building concepts up slowly and assigning challenging but manageable final assignments that integrated everything learnt prior. This capstone on the other hand had a complete 180 in terms of pedagogy. If the aim was to teach students to learn how to dig through messy documentation, fiddle with libraries and dependencies, and read page after page of stackoverflow forums, then a simple project requiring us to find a library and explain several features would’ve sufficed. Instead, we got three libraries thrown at us with nary an explanation of how to use them. I’m not talking about simply reusing code that has already been constructed by Christopher, but rather, going through analytical skills of how to deconstruct any library and work out the functions. I’ll still recommend the course, but the final capstone does leave a bad taste. I felt like I was tracking to hack together some abomination, instead of purposefully constructing a tool step by step. A shame given that the incremental style of development was emphasised by Steve and Paul a lot. Here, I was adding lines of code without care as to what they did, just in the hopes that it would give me the outputs needed to pass.

good

Excellent teaching

now courses are becoming challenging

I started the final project in the specialisation with some trepidation after reading a few of the reviews. I think most if not all the criticism is unwarranted. The coursework prepares the student very well for the project and it ended up being a lot of fun and very rewarding.

Excellent..

The course was interesting and I liked the idea of the last project BUT the platform was unusable for this kind of project. I had to extract the resources and to do it locally. The peer to peer verification system it's slow. I give a solid 7/10. I don't regret taking it.

I took this class because it was part of the Python 3 specialization (the last course actually). The main advantage of the course is the introduction to Jupyter Notebooks. A big plus for me. But the content is very (too) specific and quite in contrast with the broader applications of the 1st 4 classes in the specialization cycle. And if the idea was to deepdive in a real world application, I get it, but then it would probably have needed to be something a bit more interesting and useful (like pyplot or django). Finally, and that's the big drawback, the end project was a nightmare, an absolute waste of time. The Coursera platform could simply not handle the required homework. It would run slow (if ever), not accept anything but the raw code (all messed up). The forum is crammed with people asking for a review of their submission, without proper moderation, drowning the more interesting content. Fortunately I found a work around by running everything locally and posting the Notebook on my own site. But there should have been much better coordination between UMich and Coursera on the submission format.

The best course to learn about Pillow, tesseract, and OpenCV. I have learned how to apply them to real-life projects by completing the final project.

The Course was osm