Learner Reviews & Feedback for Advanced R Programming by Johns Hopkins University

Nice!

Top

The forum for the final week has everyone asking each other to review their assignment because it doesn't get done. There might be something broken with the system here.

With regards to content, it would probably be better to just read Hadley Wickham's "Advanced R", and "R Packages", and "ggplot2" for this whole specialisation. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the material for the specialisation was just taken from these 3 and "R for Data Science", and then compressed to make it easier to digest in 4 week chunks.

It was ok, so I'll give it 3*. But there could've been more material here. It didn't feel "Advanced" to me.

Like the first module in the specialty, this one is riddled with typos. Some of the examples could have been a little more detailed or just more examples given. Again, some of the swirl assignments were just walking through the readings. The topics covered here are more advanced, but I feel like I just read an online tutorial and didn't really take a "class".

The quality and the difficulty of this course is really good. It would even be better if more advanced topics are covered in details (e.g. AST, substitute function). However, the peer review assignment could be a pain since sometimes you do not get helpful feedback. Occasionally there are not even enough students to grade your assignment.

This course was not great. Almost all of the information is a screen scrape from a book and peer-evaluation, so you may be better off just getting the book and going through it. The mentors very occasionally participated, the authors never. The assignments are poorly written and missing too much detail.

This feels like self-study rather than being taught.

Despite the reading material is self-contained and well-organized, peer-graded assignment doesn't look good, though.

Getting attention for it to be reviewed is a hassle.

WIsh there were more assignments. The final project was the only assignment in the course. Object-oriented programming in R requires more than a single assignment to grasp- even at a superficial level.

To complete this course you have to go back and forth for the basic. Also the final assignment is bit ambiguous, more clarity is required.

It is a very good course but many a times the concepts which are used in assignments are not even taught properly in the course.

In comparison with the first course, it was not so useful. The main reason in my mind is that there was no video.

The style of these courses is not engaging. This is self study, similar to getting a book and reading.

The project object oriented programming was uninspired to say the least. Creating a special class for "Longitudinal Data" seems to me a pointless exercise since a simple dataframe with a column named "time" or something to that affect would suffice. Also, regarding the benchmarking portion of the project, the description of the file factorial_code.R to be submitted was obviously copy/pasted from the OOP portion of the project as it nonsensically refers to "Longitudinal Data". It's easy to spot the error, but you really need the correct text in order to fully understand what you're supposed to be submitting. I submitted blindly and got credit.

The textbook is useful and worth it for $10, but has a lot of typos.

I found this course a bit disappointing. There wasn't much content, no lectures or anything, it was just the book copy-pasted into a course. The final assignment was rather vague, and the course materials didn't prepare you quite enough for it. The peer grading was frustrating and took multiple days of waiting. This is especially annoying in a course where the payment is on a monthly basis: waiting for your grade might mean you have to pay for another month of subscription. I'm cancelling the specialisation and continuing on my own after this.

This courses touches many interesing aspects about R programming but I did not like the structure , it does not seem to me that it adequates its difficulty coming from "The R programming enviornment".

Also I miss some swirl lessons for many of the readings from the book. There are not too many help from the mentors and the peer assigment in week 4 took me too much time and had to consult a lot of external resources. Readings in general are OK but too simple.

I have learnt many things but

The topics are good, but very little practice of creating classes until the final quiz, which expects you to understand it completely without having done any practice.

The Object oriented programming section did not provide an adequate amount of support for the assignment, compared to any of the other parts of the Course.

just links to a webpage... no support from the mentors no support form coursera... you can use your money more wisely..

A bit too tough with not good enough teaching to truly understand the course

difference was observed in final test and study material.

"Advanced" is not really accurate. "Intermediate" is a better description. I would have given 4 stars for content alone. The faux testing and peer grading at scale doesn't work well enough, so the certificate is not worth paying for. If you need a credential, enroll in real school. If you need a decent intro to intermediate programming topics in R, this is pretty good. The text for the course is excellent and worth purchasing. The programming exercises via swirl() fail at times, and peer grading as an assessment approach is not viable at scale.

If you're relatively new to R coding and coming straight from the first course (R Programming Environment), prepare to expect the same thing... Very easy activities and a lot of reading, and then an incredibly difficult final assignment which only a small portion of the reading actually prepares you for. Researching the methods/code necessary to do it is possible do get it done but I honestly feel that I haven't actually learnt how to do it... I've done it once and if you ask me to do something similar again, I'll struggle, again.

Enjoy

Since this course, the material seems to be not thorough. In fact, it is quite "too much" on talking, but lack of examples of codes and real problem solves. That makes the contents very abstract, and learners could be very confused when doing the assignments.

Very useless. It is the same as downloading one book and reading it in a day. No videos, no guidance, no coordination. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY, I repeat. I reject taking this course.

Great gap between teaching and what is required to pass the course. Unnecessarily difficult.

The didactic material is not compelling.

Not recommended.