Learner Reviews & Feedback for Algorithmic Toolbox by University of California San Diego

I started the course to gain knowledge in algorithms but I am disappointed. Of course there are lots of assignments to do which kind of upgrade your skills. But I am disappointed with the way of explanation. The explanations are just like reading scripts. Also, they don't give the problem statement properly. I assignments, you would find the title of the problem but not the actual problem statement.

The instructors are very knowledgeable but I don't think their explanations are right up to the mark, at least not for me.

Course started out great but as time went on the quality kept dropping. Week 3 is where it started to go bad for me. The instructor kept jumbling words up and explanation was really poor. Later weeks most of the algorithms weren't properly explained and you have to actually google stuff and read and learn everything pretty much independently from elsewhere if you want to code up the problems. The blind test cases were really weird because you have no clue what went wrong and where it went wrong.

These two stars go to the instructor in week 1. I left the course after week 3 because I couldn't tolerate the accents of the instructors. I got frustrated starting from week 2 where I have to reread the subtitles to understand the material. Please let someone who can speak English fluently teach the course, please. The course goes kinds of fast, this is first course of the Specialization and it quickly jumps to Greedy algorithm, really? In general Algorithm course, it is usually taught late.

The videos and explanations are very poor. Most of the time the instructors are reading off a script, and everything feels fake. By reading off a script they are forced to "hand-wave" and do not explain concepts covered completely.

The only thing I liked about this course were the problem sets, which were interesting to do. Will not buy rest of specialization, feels like this is just a cash cow for UCSD.

I would say that the lecture part of this course is quite poor. The professor presents abstract concepts and pseudo-code without giving an example. It takes me a long time to figure out what the professor wants to say. He should've given out the example before explaining the concepts. The contents though is decent, and I learn a lot in his course.

Course content was good. Explanation of various problems, solutions and algorithms could be made easier to understand by providing more (intuitive) examples. Overall, the course is good at gaining broad understanding of the different paradigms of algorithms.

The lectures are well done; however, the course should be deprecated. There are no active mentors and the directions and exercises do not reconcile. Lastly, the PyCharm package is prone to bugs.

I Didn't find it useful for learning as a beginner in algorithms and data structures. The level of the assignments was way too high than the content covered in the lectures and study material.

The time claimed as required for this course is wildly off.. It takes at least 3 times more than 4 hours, allotted for the weekly assignments. In a way, this makes this course very expensive.

Some instructors are unqualified to be instructors. They may be good as scientists but not for instructors. That may be sounds harsh but it is the truth. I would not reccommend it.

Explanations are unnecessarily confusing and of very poor quality especially from week 5. One already has to be an expert in algorithms before taking this course.

This courser does not give a good explanation of the topics specified in the course syllabus.

Without good resources it is very difficult to solve the problems .

The language of the lecturer is soo noisy and can't understand the words.

After Listening to the first lecture itself I'm unenrolling from the course.

Feedback in assignment is not good enough.

For example, for the points and segment, there are no correct answer in output as a reference.

Teachers and faculties are not very good at explanation. Moreover all of them had boring faces like they are not interested to teach us.

The content should be more beginner friendly. It quickly transitions pace to intermediate level. I found week 3 to 5 very difficult.

The programming technique - like DP, Greedy could have been better. I had to go to other website to better understand the concepts.

Some Algorithm are not clear, and the homework submission system is not friendly at all!

Teaching technique can be better and more interesting. Not so suitable for beginners.

Was useful to week 4

after that the explanation of the algorithms became very poor

Need To improve more about clearing the topics and also the assignment.

The course is not very specific for my subjects .

I genuinly couldn't follow it,Sorry!!!!!!!!!!!!!

it's very hard

one of the worse learning experiences.

they might be good at their field and most probably they are, but because they don't know how to teach the output is close to zero.

every piece of this course is bad.

presentation are either blank reading the slides with Zuckerberg face or some overly emotional recycling from Daniel M Kane, man is stresing every following sentence, it is impossible to follow.

Content is classics of former USSR educational style: dry, high context, with some small explanation moments in more easy parts and sometimes completely skipping complex parts. leaving huge parts of material to external sources or complimentary book.

Quiz questions are sometimes formulated in some entangled manner so it's a puzzle of itself just to untangle them. not to mention that some quiz format are utter failure, like the one where you have to input 6 digits corresponding to answer option rank.

the "best" part were programming assignments. so you work thru the lecture and doing some quiz, somehow you get some understanding of how to solve some types of problems. and then bam 8 programming assignments of which only 3 types where discussed in lectures. what's the point of having lectures at all? i mean, without lectures there would 8 types of problems I wouldn't know how to solve, not a big increase from 5.

before I took wonderful course from prof. Tim Roughgarden. It had everything: good presentation style, enough of redundancy in lecture material to get better understanding of more complex topics, nice quiz question with simple answer mechanics and most important, the material you got was enough to do assignments. for some reasons I decided not to lock myself into one source of information and explore other options. waste of time.

So if you want GOOD course on algorithms don't waste your time on this one. go directly to prof. Tims Algorithms specialization offered by Princeton