Directions for completing assessments are severely lacking. So, this supposedly 8-hour course took me 35+ hours - much of it guessing at code until I could find out what I was supposed to do. Professor Brooks did excellent in the videos, though much of it had nothing to do with the assignments.

Fantastic Capstone Project. Project forces you to learn image processing techniques and teaches you a lot about OCR, its limitations and how to work around them.

Изучая этот курс я получил для себя новие знания и опыт!!

Marking issues

This course and the program specialization that this is part of, are absolutely the best course I've taken on Coursera. The instructors have put their heart into this and it shows! I have coded in Python for over 2 years (from data manipulation, ETL pipelines to simple web apps) and I simply wanted to take this course as a pre-requisite for a graduate program application. Boy I learned a lot! I'm really glad I took it and wish I had taken it years ago.

Excellent course! TY

exellent

I enjoyed the course and appreciate the effort that the professor put into the design. I like the way the 3 assignments built on each other and emphasized the content. I appreciated the discussion forums in that the hints were useful in understanding approaches to the solution. Couple of suggestions: 1. Modules only had videos, no living textbook or notebooks as in the previous 4 courses. While I found a lot of redundancy in the preceeding courses, I would have liked reference text covering key concepts in this course, and some optional exercises with a bit of structure. 2. There were a couple of concepts that I ran across that I didn't recall from the previous courses: inner functions, set() that would be valuable to review. 3. I wonder if more hints might be warranted to approach the word-list pruning algorithm for students that are really new to programming. I have many years of experience with typed languages, took this specialization to learn idiomatic python, but could see beginners really stumbling. Thanks again for the course, definitely got some ideas to apply the concepts you introduced.

While the curriculum of the course is solid, the hidden tests the team uses for all the exams can be extremely frustrating since they can test for something that isn't in the assignment descriptions. This means that even if all your code runs exactly as it's supposed to and you actually do what you've been tasked with, you will still fail the exam because of a hidden test that you have no way to interact with and therefore can't meaningfully use to improve your code. In addition, the forum staff are often very slow to answer and in some cases aren't particularly helpful. One particularly bad example obviously didn't have English as his first language which made his replies hard to understand and on top of that he was rude and snide to several students. The specialization overall is great, but the final module is extremely frustrating for the reasons given above.

This was definitely a complete let down compared to the four other sequences in this course. The video lessons are not helpful at all in preparing you for the final project. Whereas the previous professors were detailed and meticulous and provided numerous examples to work through, this professor goes super fast and doesn’t bother to really explain anything other than “read the documentation”. Almost everything you are required to do is not really covered in the lessons. No problems are worked out. No more than a single, simple example is worked through. Much of what is expected mechanically isn’t even discussed in the previous course sequences so referring to those videos and the countless examples of accumulation patterns aren’t entirely helpful. This is not to say that EVERYTHING needs to be demonstrated but that more information needs to be provided in order to make larger logical leaps in our coding of the final projects—particularly given that this course is supposed to be introductory in nature. The project documents have contradictions. Like one description says the parameter should be a string and then another says it should be a tuple only a few paragraphs later. Which is it? This happens multiple times and is never address or fixed. There is no sticky on the discussion forums to indicate what to do! The discussion forums aren’t helpful and the moderators rarely respond in a way that is helpful or timely. It is almost like they don’t want this portion to be for those who are beginning to code. As someone with an instructional design and education background, this is simply poor pedagogy and needs to be completely reworked from the ground up. More scaffolding needs to be provided. Projects that are more correlated to the course content—like in the previous four sections of the class—should be designed. There is no link to easy access to the juypter notebook and he kept making reference using the notebook to test things. In conclusion: make a separate course on image manipulation and let the final project for this five course sequence be more related to building on the fundamentals that were taught in the first four portions of the course. It's this lack of alignment and scaffolding that drives many people away from computer science, mathematics, and other STEM fields. When the lesson really bowls down to ‘RTFM' then you know you messed up somewhere in your instruction and design of the course. Because if you want us to RTFM give us a manual that is actually helpful.

Do not take this "course." It is a random collection of videos covering quite disparate topics that do not have much to do with each other. The general goal of learning how to "do software engineering" is not accomplished. The videos do not provide insight or instruction for how to accomplish some of the tasks in the assignments (e.g. how to generate a hex code), when any course should be self-contained or reference specific readings to find guidance. The assignments almost all contain out of date and inaccurate instructions or materials, requiring learners visit the discussion forums. The assistance in the forum is low quality, with disorganized and difficult-to-understand (due to language issues I believe) instruction, requiring us to search through many previous posts that are not well categorized. Assignments are generally poorly designed - the platform and instructions were a massive barrier to testing and practicing my acquired knowledge. Often I felt that I knew the answer and could implement code that would run elsewhere but the instructions did not state something correctly or the autograder changed parameters that we did not have reason to believe would change.