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

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.

The first four courses of this specialization were great. This course, however, is aimless and low effort. Ideally, this course would force the student to apply everything they learned in the first 4 classes to produce something interesting. Instead, it's a meandering skimming of a few image processing libraries. Was the goal to teach us how to read Python documentation? There are plenty of other ways to do that with simpler libraries that don't require long detours into abstract details about graphics. Lectures and instructions are riddled with errors. One video features a head shot of the instructor giving a verbal narration of navigating a console window. It feels like they meant to overlay it with someone actually performing the actions on a computer, but instead you get to imagine in your mind what a command prompt must look like. The python installation instruction video is wrong top to bottom - while the narrator reads out the instructions, the video actually shows them failing on input... but the instructor moves on. The final project is too complicated for the Coursera Jupyter environment and it takes ages to run. You can install the environment on your own computer, but the instructions for that are wrong too and don't have the right libraries (one isn't available for Windows!). Some of the lecture videos are the instructor literally reading, word for word, the Jupyter notebook pages. Plenty of students have posted to the message boards with solutions to the many issues with the materials, some going back a year. But nobody seems to want to actually update the course. I powered through the technical issues and nonsensical videos in this course to get the specialization, but I feel no more accomplished for it, as the challenge in this course is to figure out what the heck you're supposed to be learning here.

Previous courses of this specialization were best taught. But in this course the instructor moves forward throughout the course very quickly , It was difficult to move with this pace. Although from this course we also learn something new but in difficult manner.

Though the material covered was good and it worked as applied course for using all the techniques learned in the previous courses of the specialization, the information given was not proper and that required a lot of wasted time on learners side. A special blot was the final project, where even submission and peer review framework was not properly set resulting in a lot of frustration and productivity loss.

Subjective Rating: 4 Mediocre enough for the average person but I was looking for the real stuff, stuff you need to work on for day on end, guess you have to pay good buck to get that stuff (definitely not 50 bucks). How about going to (e-) college? Objective Rating: 5 Big up to the people who created this though (esp. prof Brooks), there's all kinds of people in this world and not everyone is on the same level starting this course. I think, as an introduction, this is probably one of the best places to learn the basics of Python and most importantly, how you can apply it in real-life (course 4).

It was usefull

It was a more challenging course than the previous ones, which is good, but the Jupiter notebook environment was a little difficult to work with

Great and detailed, lots of useful exercises and clear videos.