The first week has one assignment: a five question quiz that reviews the syllabus, course/program design and purpose. As someone with multiple degrees and a PhD significant other - both of us work, and are successful, in data analysis and research. My career is centered around Business Intelligence. I was hoping to engage a program that would help me develop R programming skills and build my skill set. After watching all the videos twice, taking notes, completing almost five hours of online research into the topics that I encountered during my first attempt at the quiz, having my significant other review the topics & questions with me, I still failed to pass the quiz after ten attempts. Hence, a syllabus quiz is my roadblock to moving forward in the program. This is not pride, I am not imagining myself to be a genius who is insulted by this failure. Frankly, no one is stupid enough to have not been able to comprehend a syllabus and course desi

The Amazon Polly robot voice has to go. It may make it easier to update the course on the instructors' end, but it degrades the quality of the course from the students' perspective to a degree that is not even close to acceptable. I'm surprised they are trying to get away with it despite the primitive state this technology is still in.

As for the course content; this is certainly not for a beginner. Not because the content is difficult, but because the way they teach it is terrible for someone who isn't familiar with R already. They just shoot a million concepts and definitions at you with short descriptions and little examples. I tried to take this course years ago as a beginner and it was so discouraging. Now that I have a few years experience, it is a good refresher and nice to pick up a couple new tips. That's all it's good for though, a refresher.

most part of this course is a duplicate of the "R programming" course.

microphone/sound of the teacher quality is very bad.

not original, boring, dividing this in "4 weeks" is too ridiculously long, this should be done in 1 week to enable users to take more time for the "R programming".

this course should be free. don't lose too much time on it, it's doable in a day or a weekend and move on to "R programming".

asking for so much money to see how to install R and github is a shame.

feels like this course has been added just to have a round number for the specialization.

even the survey in the end asking for feedback starts with a question not adapted to moment it's been asked "did you get a certificate?" of course i did not as i've just finish the course and now wait for my peers to review my final submission.

Very unimpressed with the justification of leaning on automated voice instruction for updated content, when the content is still outdated. For anyone who prefers human interaction, intonation, a sense of engagement with visual queues, will be disappointed. This misses the mark as having any merit beyond a reading manual. In fact, a book is outlined more effectively, because the instruction is approached with reading in mind, which is not the case in the written form provided. Truly disappointed and will not continue with future Johns Hopkins course offerings.

I tried really hard to keep going with this course. I expected much more from such a prestigious university and it is a shame that this is the product they put together. The automated voice can't keep me focused, even when I tried to read along with the written lecture. I understand the reason they chose to use an automated voice but it makes the course just worthless. So I am going to do the Google Data Analytics certificate and supplement with other courses from Coursera as I go along.

Utterly rubbish. The course creator claims at the beginning of the course that the automated reading videos are being used in order to facilitate easier updates to material. However, not only are the automated readings monotonous, they're also out of date! Turns out that I had a problem receiving emails from GitHub to verify my account there. Be warned that you can NOT pass this course unless you can successfully complete some trivial tasks on Github. This course was a waste of my time.

I am sorry but the robot-based voiceover, extremely slow pace, and lack of interactivity made this specialization unbearable. Additionally, choosing R over Python seems illogical for many reasons, such as Python being the #1 language for data science, ML, AI (if you'd ever consider specializing in these areas).

Poor experience - gave up after the 3rd week and started the one from Michigan (applied data science w/ python).

Git should be introduced more slowly, over multiple courses. I cannot possibly absorb all the command line instructions that were mentioned in the class. There are just too many.

Please PLEASE *PLEASE* spread out the course content on Git over 3 or 4 courses, so we can practice it as we submit assignments. I forsee numerous wasted hours fiddling with Git Bash trying to make it work, not knowing what mistake I'm making.

This is the last John Hopkins course i will take. The automated voice is very distracting and frankly out of date with newer applications that are more realistic. Taking this approach they have lost the connection with the audience and it appears to me that they are focussed on themselves and not customer centric.

The advantages of recoreded classes seems to have escaped the people who developed this format.

$38 is a lot to pay for tutorials about how to install software. This course takes only 20 minutes to complete. It is also obsessed with command line interfaces. There's a reason that they were left behind in the 80s. It does cover GUI software like Rstudio, which is ignored for the rest of the course. How about something on the desktop Github version? https://desktop.github.com/ So much easier to use.

Quizzes were based off of extremely high level overview videos not covering anything specifically or deep diving into anything. When applying the git commands covered, numerous errors arose. Overwhelmingly academic course with very little hands on. This is not for anyone actually looking to work in this field, but for someone looking to be able to talk about this field.

It is explained very, very poorly. I spent two days Youtubing and googling to understand, R Markdow, Conrol Version, linking git to github and R Studio. What would be the point of paying for this course then? Also, the voice over is aweful. It is not read by a human being but rather a machine which makes it irritable. I hope you will work on it and make it better.

No value as a stand alone course, as completing it provided no more knowledge, skills, or attitudes than, say a 15 minute Ted Talk would. May help prepare me for other courses in the Data Scientist Specialization, but it's difficult to say until I complete those courses. I may come back and change this review after completing other courses in the specialization.

While it's amazing to save costs and resources by creating automated voice-overs, it would be helpful if commands on the screen match what is being said. It was quite challenging going back and forth between lecture videos and lecture notes to copy and paste commands. I find it time-consuming, and I hope this problem can be rectified for future classes.

I have absolutely no idea how could this become a separate course - and one spread over 4 weeks. It is extremely basic, extremely general and extremely high level. It should be compressed to 1-2 hours and added as an _optional prerequisite_ to other courses in this specialization. I personally feel cheated out of my 29 USD.

0.1 star.

They charge you to take a class that explains how to install a few programs. If you go to the program's websites, there is directions to install it anyway, so this was completely unnecessary. Waste of money. This class should give you some early training on R before throwing it at you in the next course without enough training.

The videos aren't videos, they are really boring slide shows. On top of that, the computer voice is really monotonous. it just keeps going and going. This approach to teaching has been a large disappointment for me. So in short this class is dull, tedious, and repetitious, and all-around lacking in variety and interest.

Worthless course. There should have been no need for this course and the fact that they charge money for this is disappointing. This module could have been easily merged with the next module (R- Programming). Just a few pages with instructions on how to install the required softwares and repositories would have sufficed.

I don't have comment on the data scientist's toolbox. However, the payment mechanism of coursera is terribly designed.

I was continually paying the course without pre notice. The worse thing is, the coursera doesn't return the money after I cancel. At the same time, they don't allow me to enter the class. Really terrible.

This course was a loss of time and money. Except from week 3 material, the rest can be found on the internet and should be required by everyone who wants to take that specialization. This course doesn't worth it, it's just to take extra money from anyone who wants to learn about Data Science.

I had a very bad experience with this whole course set-up. Especially the peer-grading, you have no insight on why they assigned this score to you - nothing.. ..especially when you know you did your course work correctly.. i will never come back to coursera.. waste of money !!!

Complete waste of time. This should be a course on its own, and much less be charged for. This should have been the 1st week of an actual class. This only dealt with installing a couple of software tools. Hopefully the following courses will teach something worthwhile.

The content might be good, but the machine voice in the videos makes the information unbearable to be absorbed, I was unable to complete it. I want to improve my knowledge about Data Science but I will try with another provider. I won't recommend this course.

Poco atractivo visualmente, la voz robótica es cero motivante y los cuestionarios no son desafiantes. Respecto a los cuestionarios, además de no desafiantes, las alternativas son muchas veces incomprensibles y no relacionadas con el contenido de la unidad.

Very bad course so far. Very little detail and Assignments are very hard to solve. Worst $500 dollars spent in my life, and the course isn't worth even $10!

I'm an online instructor myself and the quality of the course isn't worth its price!