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

great!

I give this course 3 stars because: Firstly, I did learn something from this project. Secondly, I am also a little dissapointed with this project. Let me start with pros: Although my job doesn't require image processing, I believe in the future I may need skills with pillow, tesseract etc. So it is a very good starting point to learn something outside of pandas, numpy, seaborn, etc. Also, this course gives me opportunity to explore different libraries independently with a little guidence. cons. As this is final project of 4 python programming courses from very beginning to advanced concepts like functions, classes. I was looking forward to a comprehensive project which could cover all the concepts and skills we learned from previous 4 courses, plus a little expoloration of new library. Also, I really love final projects of past 4 courses in this specialization, especially the last two projects (my favorite is the final project of the third course). With milestones, step by step missions, and application of almost all the stuff learned previously. As I had previous coding experiences in java and C++(not professional programmer though), it is not too tough for me to figure out what to do with this project(still a little challenging in the beginning) I can see how tough it is to those who never coded before. I do recommend this project to those who have some experiences with python and would love to explore more python libraries. For pure beginners, I recommend UMich to redesign this course. Anyway, it is a fantastic specialization, and I really learned a lot. The learning platform and in-lecture practice is just amazing. Thank you UMich team. Although I am not alum of Umich, still wanna say: Go Blue!

Great specialization, but the final course project was poorly constructed and tedious.

Learned a lot

Even though the pillow, tesseract and opencv libraries are very cool and interesting to use - the project does not present a useful challenge. The instructor felt like he was just reading code off a script and there was no interactive problem-solving or debugging. The project's scope was too specific in its usability and the explanation of the libraries was also lacking. It leaves too much for you to figure out on your own - which would be great if it was challenges related to writing good code, but the challenges were related to figuring out how to use these specific libraries and spend time finding methods which let you do what you wanted it to. I think the project can be improved by giving more clearer instructions on the libraries, but more challenge on the programming logic. Given the nature of image processing, a lot of time was also spend waiting for the code to finish running before you can debug (and each run took minutes)

This course might be good for some who are interested to learn PIL and OCV but for python language specialization this course is a bit off topic. They should have taught advanced programming concepts after classes and inheritance e.g. idiomatic programming. This course is taught at a high speed too. Sometimes it becomes hard to follow. May be in future they add more relevant content related to language instead of this course, in the specialization. The focus of this course is to teach how to get help, use and read documentation from different python libraries, which do not required a separate course to my point of view. Neither this course covers pillow, tesseract, and opencv concepts in detail. Michigan please review the content in this course and make it more relevant to python programming, I know you can do better. See you in another specialization.

I liked the course. But it packed a lot of information. Although I enjoyed the assignments. Looking forward the next courses.

Unfortunately, the assignment is too hard to work on with the Coursera notebook and the submission of the project is very hard to peer review. Most of us have to copy paste then add the newline (as if we are coding other person's work)

This course was a huge disappointment. After going through the first courses of the Python 3 Programming Specialisation, you would expect more of the final module. The subjects covered are extremely interesting and were basically the reason I started this specialisation in the first place, but they are not really taught. This could have easily been a 8-week course, but they did everything in a hurry and crammed the most interesting subjects in 3 badly organised weeks. There is no teaching method here. There is only a programmer that shows you he can do some cool things with these python modules and then asks you: "Can you do the same?". There is no supporting presentation, only a video of his screen while using an online tool (that glitches a lot and has no real use for you in the real world) while he's speaking so fast about the code he is going to write that you will have to pause and go back several times to read what that code is doing and try to figure it out by yourself. Actually, the videos themselves are a waste of time, since everything he says is written as comments in the tool you're going to use anyway, because he was just reading everything that's written there. I fully support the logic that a programmer should go and read the documentation of the modules in order to understand better how the functions and methods and classes work, but we already do that everyday. He even says some of that documentation is incomplete and badly written. I came here looking for a course, a teacher, BECAUSE the documentation is not enough. Having someone to actually guide you through those codes and documentation is what I expect from a programming teacher. This course DOES NOT deliver that. What this course gives, you can get by going to any forum on the web.

I'm writing this in hopes that the content owners take note and make some adjustments. After weaning us off of the on-line workbook (which is a very nice tool) and completing the previous four courses (which were very well done), this course takes a jarring turn. For starters, the video to install Python went so far into the weeds I had to uninstall everything I was told to install and search for assistance from the web. Because I work full time, I lost about a week just undoing and redoing the installation in my spare time. The video lectures are average, although I found myself doing searches several times to understand why something was coded the way it was. The Jupyter notebook they provide is unexpectedly unstable; I found myself copying all of my code to a separate file after losing portions of it, and more than once the kernel stopped and restarted itself, which really required a reboot to get it working properly again. My final observation is the scoring - it's entirely pass or fail. I don't agree with this - the project has several facets that I think can and should be assessed individually. Yes, I understand that some university courses choose to grade a final project in such a way, but in a case like this I don't think it's appropriate. At one point, my frustration level was high enough that I seriously considered forgoing the specialization certificate because I was spending too much time on it. The previous four courses were excellent; please don't conclude the student's experience with a capstone project that feels like it was launched and then neglected. It's like the specialization's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.