I really enjoy working on the topic of Big Data. I also think that the course structure and theoretical content as such is very useful and logical. Hence the 3 stars. However, hands on assignments and packages provided are outdated and getting the environment to run properly takes a lot of time and programming knowledge that I, for one, do not have. Also, data in the hands on assignements have changed, hence it is not always possible to reproduce results from assignments, which is really annoying if these results are part of a quiz. Generally, I do not think that solutions to circumvent errors due to outdated packages and data should be sourced and applied by the student through the forum. It should be in the interest of Coursera and / or the instructors to test the environment and provide updates where necessary. I really have to consider whether I want to continue with the next modules and Coursera in general given that most of my time is spent on getting the environment to run the hands on assignments running.

The elaborations in video lecture sometimes are too complicated to understand. It should consider all students comes from different industry. For example, the disease/gene relationships, actually it can replaced by GeneA, DiseaseA, etc. Also, the slides are not clear enough for students to capture the outstanding points. It's not good for students to review since it's truly vague of the relationships between the list items. Overall, the lecture is just different to understand, even causing confusion sometimes.

the course content is critical and as it appears in many interviews, and the fundamental understanding is important for beginners to learn this new area. however I think the software (spark or mongoDB) can be taught in a more systematic way (at least point out some resources that can help people learn them based on individual needs). I understand this course is for beginners and people supposed to learn deeper on themselves. but a road map will be helpful and reduce the pain finishing the tests.

The course was good enough...but exercises were very simple. Only the final course was little bit challenging. For a guy that sits in IT business for a while it's rather too simple. Besides, I've learned spark basics which is super cool...so thanks for that

Maybe you could consider to build docker image instead of using virtual machines. VM is ok, but I think that docker can simplify all the stuff without necessary downloading, installations etc.

Looking forward to the next spark challenges :)

Too many software issues/installation bugs hampering the learning process. The setup procedures for every quiz takes up around 80% of the time and only 20% actually answering the quiz. Please reduce the number of quiz or consolidate them for learners do that we only need to do setup once. Mentor/Instructor presence in various discussions in which students encounter setup/installation issues are next to full absence and many sudents are left figuring out the problems themselves

This course gives an introductory overview in Bigdata processing and explain a variety of tools with little depth, concepts are well explained but the workshops take extra effort to complete due to the fact that the tools versions are outdated, some questionnaires don’t match python workbooks and some assignments for the final project don’t have practical examples in the lessons, so you have to use other learning resources.

Good content, good instructors - they have a nice way of conveying a message, making it easy to follow. I'm rating this course as 3 stars as the content is not kept up to date at all: materials, files, technical dependencies, versioning of the tools - it consumes MUCH, MUCH more time to get the tools setup in place correctly (so that you are able to run the hands-on exercises) compared to the actual time spent studying

While the contents are very interesting and the lectures very thorough the practical side has many draw backs. For instance: Connections to PostgresSql did not work even reading the FAQs, same with streaming data in spark. There are not enough examples on syntax and coding to correctly do the assignments. Overall I am happy with the course but it needs some improvements.

So, in general, the course provides you with significant knowledge about big data integration processing, however there were simple exercises that could be done faster if there were no problems executing the commands. This problem leads students to quit the course.

I request the staff correct those errors in order to increase the approval rate.

Good experience of using the big data tools but a total lack of engagement in the forums by the instructors and community mentors make it hard going if anything goes wrong. The final quiz took me over 8 hours mostly because there was no one to ask for hints when I was totally stuck and confused!

The hands on exercises were very helpful and the course content was great. However, there were many issues while downloading datasets and configuring other applications. This should be updated so that students don't have to go to the forums every single time.

The course covers interesting materials and seems thorough. It's mostly lectures and reading, and not so much actually working with the technology. Since the latter tends to be the hardest part, the overall difficulty remains on the low end of the scale.

I feel the contents of this course were great, no second thought on it. It makes your concepts crystal clear. But faced lots of issues during practicing the hands on exercises and did not get proper feedback or response on any of the queries.

The hands on dataset installation had lots of problems while installing and spark and mongodb hardly worked even after multiple installations and i had tried many ways to get it to work but there was no benifit.

Lots of technical issues with assignments. Spent a lot of time troubleshooting issues that have been around for 9 months or more and never addressed. Seems like this course has been abandoned by creators.

Content was up to date but practice exercises are limited to Cloudera platform as well as too old. Need to be updated with more use cases and more exercises.

Thanks Coursera :)

the explanation for the hands on exercises are poor. Had to waste a lot of tie and consult forum discussions as well as other inline tutorial a lot.

The course material is not sufficient to work out the exercises. For the Spark final quiz you will have to take up another course to pass this one.

Assignments related to quiz could have been better explained as there was less explanation w.r.t some spark related quiz and MongoDB related quiz

Course hasn't been updated for years, there is too much of programming (namely for/in MongoDB), which is, by no means, straight-forward.

It is a good course, but the hands-on exercises have a lot of issues and it is really hard to find support through the forums.

There were a lot of problems with the hands-on... a lot of bugs. You can rewrite / update the scripts. This would help a lot.

Programming instructions were not clear, and the version of Python that was installed on my machine did not support the Jupy

I wish that the Spark programming should have been covered in more details as was the MongoDB and Splunk covered.

Installation instructions need to be improved. Wasted too much time installing, rather than hands-on practice