Learner Reviews & Feedback for A Crash Course in Data Science by Johns Hopkins University

Good for ABSOLUTE beginners

Quiz is not designed good.

Its ok , waiting for more

Very basic and to short.

Too shallow in coverage

this is Old content

Very basic course!

Interesting course

Very Good Content

needed more depth

Good to know

Very basic.

Too basic.

too easy

Nice!

Ok

B

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O

i was quite dissapointed from the 2nd half of the module "A Crash Course in Data Science". The most interesting part for me was right at the begining: the explanation of the differences and overlappings between ML (area where I have experience) and traditional statistics (area I've never worked in). I deeply disliked a repeated message across different videos in the 2nd half of the module, that data scientists should develop themselves all kind of software artifacts... it doesn't work like that, it cannot and must not work like that in large organisations.

I work in a large organisation. A situation that we are facing right now is that a number of data analytics initiatives are popping up like champignons across the organisation, within the different operational departments. Very often the colleagues involved are not really data scientists, often they are lawyers with an interest (and some training) in analytics, in the best case they are economists. The creation of pieces of code in every floor and corner of the organisation is a nightmare, from several points of views: security, business continuity (when one of those lawyers quits a department, often there is no one to continue / maintain that code... which by the way was written not following any standards of software development).

In that context, our management is evaluating how to put coherence and structure in all the data work, how to create synergies, share knowledge... that is the reason why I started this training (i am a middle manager; my background is mathematics MSc, i am not a data scientist / statistician though)... tempted by the title "executive data science", which I interpreted as: "how to best organise data analytics in an organisation".

In my vision of properly organising data analytics / science in a large organisation there is no space for everybody writing code, somehow, uncontroled, at each point of each data science project. Rather I would dream of a common, coherent framework, standard data quality/governance/ownership and data acquisition approach across the organisation, standard tools supporting each step of the data science project, standard methodology. If coding still needed, in particular for development of interactive websites or apps (for communication of results), then to be developed by software engineers following agile standard code development, including: analysis, prototyping, reference architecture, versioning, QA, testing, documenting...ensuring security, maintenance and continuity, ensring also reusability ...

But seems I have misunderstood the title with respect "executive". Mea culpa.

Ref: "A Crash Course in Data Science" the content could be presented in a simpler way. Some of the presentations sounds little vague and conceptual level like an Advanced Math or, Statistics class. I am wondering since this is an Executive program, is there a simpler and easy to grasp way to present the material. The text download files (i.e. txt) document descriptions needs to be more clearer. The Power Point downloads are excellent and are to the point.

I felt that the speakers used an awful lot of words to say very few things - they could reduce the length of this course by about 50% if they were more concise and too the point. Also, it would help if they had microphones as it would improve the sound quality. They should also tidy up the background, e.g. wipe unrelated text from the chalkboard, and remove clutter from behind them.

Came in with high expectations, but the content didn't meet them. Some of the videos have poor audio/video quality, read out dry definitions that are not very relevant. The lecture notes and video content contain factual mistakes (section of software is filled with errors) and confuse the notion of machine learning with data science throughout.

They could have stated the audience of the course more clearly. I found most of the information irrelevant that added little value. Most of the things discussed are generic and would apply to any project.

Too much Superficial. Too fewer quizes. More external videos about hadoop, python, spark, data lakes. More paradigms broken. Need to explain what is On premise, rent and cloud.