Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Big Data by University of California San Diego

great

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ok

Quizzes appear to have been written by someone who simply went through the videos and slides and looked for things for the student could parrot back rather than by someone who was asking questions based on understanding of the material.

Videos is not a great medium for this kind of thing. It is slow and hard to review. I understand the desire to replicate a classroom experience, but without the ability to interrupt and ask a question, that isn't what you are creating. The transcript system is quite helpful in this regard, but really, if you just gave me a short text to read that clearly stated the things discussed in the video it would be more efficient.

The course is gives a good overview on big data as a topic. I personnally found the questions in the reviews sometimes arbitrary. I would have liked more implementation and a bit more technical flavour. At the same time the technical infrastructure (Cloudera virtual Machine) needs to be updated. It is bit messy working on a machine with such a bad screen resolution. E.g.: Unfortunately, installing the guest additions affects the functionality of haddop on the virtual machine. Thus, in the practical part one bothers more with technical issues than the actual implementation.

The content of the course is alright and up to date. The instructors are also good, passionate and has a great knowledge.

What brings everything down is the video editing and the slide design/quality. They are terrible and clearly not in the field of profession of the creators.

All in all, it is an average course, but I can recommend it to anyone interesting in the topic, because it does its job. If someone could improve the slides and the video editing could reach the youtube video reviewer/critic level, it could easily do a 4 out of 5.

This is an introduction course, and no advanced concepts are seen. I think it provides a good background, that is all. If you have a solid technical (programming, databases, etc.) knowledge maybe you will miss more hand-ons. For me, for an introductory and theoretical course I expected more resources, for example additional suggested readings, optional exercises...

Lectures are well structured (intro and summary at the end), but I have missed presentations from some of the most interesting videos (week 6).

The course is ok but I found that there were some technical quirks that could be ironed out first. Example is to download the text files in the final assignment the command wget is invaluable. How to leave safe mode if the Name node is in safe mode. VirtualBox is default to 32 bit/ubuntu when the image is 64 bit/Centos/Redhat.

In addition the course content is a bit little. It says 3 weeks but I finish it in 2 days. Perhaps it is about quality and not quantity.

Really difficult to understand for the new hand who don't knowledge the knowledge about programming, computer science, etc.

One of the difficulty is the many technique words. I suggest that providing the animation video to present some concept such as MapReduce should be more understandable.

However, after this lesson I can have a foundation perception in Big Data. Thanks for the Coursera, the University and course lecturers.

I faced lots of issues using VirtualBox and Cloudera as it kept on throwing several errors and not all errors are captured in FAQ document that exists in one of the Weekly Topic + also whomever I approached for this error were also not aware on how to resolve it + Coursera Help Center was also not able to me provide resolution!! :(

But, after trying hands on activities, it was satisfying that I got to learn something new!!

I think this course was a great introduction the data science.. but needs some updating in terms of instantiation of the Cloudera image.. Docker was a much cleaner way for me to get up and running with the image.

Also this course was mostly about the methods of Data Science, not necessarily about big data.. but a great foundation has been laid and still looking forward to more coding with hadoop in future courses.

A little too much dull talking. The content is (slowly) read from the promter and it shows. The materials lack diversity and creativity. Too much fancy words (eg. We have 5 V's? - Let's introduce the sixth and seventh one!) instead of some meaningful science. That said, it is indeed a gentle introduction to the subject which everyone can understand backed up with a lot of interesting real-life examples.

Overall it is a good course introducing Big Data concepts. However, there is no technical help on how to get the tools working. Some posts in the forums help. The course designers should mine the forums for problems and solutions and develop FAQs or technical tips for the tools. I had to change settings in windows control panel, app features based on a cryptic (but helpful) post and finally g

I think the course contain too much theory, and following the slides I can save some time in videos. I'd like to have more feedback in the discussions (I do know there are too many students to follow), but at least confirming my responses are valid and make sense. I liked the last part of the course about Hadoop and the implementation in Cloudera's VM.

The course was very useful with what knowledge it provides. However, it would be better if there were more hands-on exercises on relevant stuff. The exercises are too easy and boring. Tougher exercises should be added and more time should be spent on the Hadoop Ecosystem part. Knowing the history helps but it should not replace more important topics.