This course is teaching how to work with data in a distributed environment. While getting used to IBM Cloud takes time, it is definitely a friendlier environment for data scientists and it removes the burden of setting up the infrastructure.

Good course, but some of the later videos and assignments refer to data generation on Cloudant and NodeRed that made the videos confusing since the Cloudant videos were removed. This caused me to jump between the course and youtube videos to learn about data generation, only to find out it wasn't necessary.

Eeverything related with the graded assesment in this course fails, it's outdated and the practicla exercises are not well explain, if you are looking for a hard struggle to get very simple things done, this is your course

Not so worth learning compare to the predecessor of this course. Should have included more assignment would have made the course very interesting.

Not enough coding, or I would like more interactive coding if that was possible in coursera. Or how would we do this like locally?

Outdated content, with corrections as annotations in the videos. Not very engaging and has just a little of spark content.

the content is really good but I don't understand the Indian accent well although this guy really did his best

Need more exercises related to wrangling data and manipulating SQL's with apache spark

Nice but details are not discussed properly only taking names wasnt enough

Assigments needs to be better defined and explained

Too many issues with lab material

I find it unacceptable that the grader still had the same old problems from months ago. Adding notes directly to the python notebooks is not that difficult. #Return 4 significant digits, etc.

Plus, the grader output is not always useful. I execute the function in the python notebook, for whatever reason it does not fail, it works. The grader is more sensitive as it should be but it would be more meaningful at least it mentioned which line it has failed or which cell or which function.

The quizes during the videos seems a bit too random. I expect, if you are interrupting a video, you would be asking a question whose answer would be relevant for the later part of the video. Those pop-ups feels like unannounced midterm exams. There is already a full quiz section for this.

Perhaps my expectations were too high for this course.

Course content contains too much screen capture of clicking rapidly through IBM could menus. In most cases, the version of IBM Cloud now being deployed varies from the course, so students have to figure it out themselves.

Also, explanation of the tools and resources is very short - line one sentence. We are left to figure out what the tools are - cloudant and node-RED especially.

This course and certificate look like they should come after the first Data Science Certificate (9 courses). But there is a definite gap between the two. It is not clear what course is supposed to bridge that gap.

This course needs work. There needs to be more of a challenge, being an advanced course I expect a certain level of difficulty. I think the knowledge is too high level. There also needs to be more of a hands on approach. Let me connect to the Cloudent service, and more practice using spark and map functions.

Simply not on the same level as other ML Courses on Coursera. Programming assignments don't require you to do much by yourself. The bits you have to write, you have to guess from function names (no task description or anything is given).

Very good course but codes and instructions are outdated. It needs serious improvement on that part. It is costing a lot more time to finish this simple course.

Cannot understand what the instructor is saying half of the time... because he speaks really really fast...

The instruction is not so clear. Many mistake launch and grader does not run to score your submission.

Very fiddly. Video instructions do not correspond to IBM interfaces.

I don't understand why the level was marked as advance

Quite outdated and chaotic

感觉没什么卵用，就学会了IBM云的基本操作

While the course info describes this course as a beginner level, I would not describe it so. A lot of technical terms are thrown around without even saying a word about them let alone explain them.

The course is very disorganized, and the instructions for the assignments are not correct (and outdated). You have to basically figure out on your own how to set up the system before you even start doing the actual assignments. What you actually experience is completely different from what you see in the screenshots of the instructions.

This has been my experience just after being 2 weeks into the course. Hopefully things get better in the last two weeks. Honestly, so far I have only learnt a bunch of names.

I will update my review at the end of the course, if needed.

UPDATE: I eventually decided to unenroll from this course. This course is not worth it, in my opinion.

The lectures are quite useless. Assignments are almost irrelevant to Apache Spark. Estimated time for the course/assignments are so incorrect. You basically need 10mins instead of 3h to finish an assignment because there's only a couple of lines to fill in with your code.

This is by far the worst.

The content is very poor so that 'advanced' should be removed.

In addition, the lecturer's English is unclear and not easy to understand, however, as there is empty content you don't need to worry.

I just wasted my money and time.