Learner Reviews & Feedback for Fundamentals of GIS by University of California, Davis

I really enjoyed this course and I learned a lot. My only critique is that most of the lectures were about specific processes and tools in ArcGIS, but they were not necessarily created in such a way that students could follow along in ArcGIS easily. I think it would be easier to learn and remember all of the processes if each lecture were more structured around the student going through the same actions as the lecturer.

I would give this course 4.5 stars if I could. It is a great course and I feel like I really grasped the basics of GIS and using ArcMap after I completed it. The only reason that I gave it 4 stars is that it would be nice if there were an intro course like this that was a little more geared towards people who already have some basic knowledge of SQL and relational databases so that the course could move a little faster.

I found a number of the lessons were light on content, but I have guilty knowledge having used ArcMap on and off for the past few years. A lot of the meat of this course is replicated in similar or only slightly more detail in the follow-on class in the specialization. If you have experience with GIS or Arc I would strongly recommend skipping this class and moving directly to GIS Data Formats, Design and Quality.

I really liked the instructor and his style, and the course was layout well. But pay attention in the lectures and do the assignments. I'm not giving 5-stars because I feel that a little more lecture time should have been dedicated to using ArcMap to do spatial joins, as well as having a few more examples, each with different end-goals for the joined columns.

But the course is very good, and I'm glad I took it.

I enjoyed this course and thought it was a great intro to GIS. Instructions and videos were thorough and I feel like I have the tools I need to move on to the next course. Sometimes it felt like there was less focus on more challenging topics (like spatial joins) and more on topics like exporting documents. This is an intro course though so I understand we were trying to cover a lot at a basic level.

Contains a lot of great content through videos and demonstrations that are easy to follow and in depth enough to understand the concepts. Would be great if there was a way to contact the professor or someone within Coursera to help with technical issues, as I ran into quite a few of those along the way and did not have anyone to reach out to (not a problem with the actual course, just the courser

This course is not lying about being fundamental, and it's a good thing! I was struggling to find a course to start GIS, and I am genuinely relieved to have found this specialization. Although I couldn't give a full star because of it not using ArcGIS Pro, but this course splendidly covers what is essential to start with GIS.

Thank you very much for Nick Santos and team to make this available!

I found the course tutorials and materials really good and clear. I found achieving what I wanted on ARC GIS much harder than I thought it would be, so it was re-assuring where they indicated that people would re-watch the tutorials more than once (Can't tell you how many times I had to watch them to get some elements of the course!!). But encouraged to go on and do the next one.

Comprehensive introductory course, providing links, ways to approach troubleshooting when learning online/by yourself plus background information. The videos that accompany the weekly assigments provide insights into the learning material that is actually being used in the assignments. By taking the weekly quizes one was enabled to assess their own learning process. Thank you!

The guided assignments were excellent. In the lectures, however, I sometimes missed the forest for the trees. Since this course is for novices to GIS, an overall "roadmap" covering the forest of functions in ArcGIS would be helpful.

Nick Santos presents the materials in a clear, low-key manner, while conveying a good deal of enthusiasm - I enjoyed listening.

Very well organized course. Nick is fantastic. It would help if the peer review process could be streamlined, as it is rather tedious. I burned a week waiting for peer reviews. My recommendation to other students is to always be taking multiple courses at a given time so you can focus on the other course while waiting for blocking issues.

Very well structured, comfortable learning curve, great material, great teacher.

The only reason I'm not giving it 5 stars is due to the heavy focus on ArcGIS. I understand that learning GIS requires a working environment to learn in, but the course is more "what can you do in ArcGIS" and less "what can you do with GIS".

The course material was detailed and the facilitator made the subject understandable. Learning GIS was interesting. However, waiting for peers to review my work was frustrating. I reviewed more than 6 assignments for others but my assignment was only reviewed last minute after I sent requests in the discussion forum.

Nick Santos is great and the course covers a lot of content, and I definitely feel like I have the fundamentals down. That being said, the Peer Review portion of the course is a frustrating ordeal. I expect it is in any Coursera course, but this was my first experience.

In general, it's quite helpful for me, but it could be a little bit too fundamental sometimes, for example the professor would explain things like how to find a button... which may not be so necessary, but it's ok, I think I will enroll the next course of this series.

Very enthusiastic instructor.

Good starting course, very well structured (with just the necessary small repetitions to consolidate knowledge).

Good final assignment.

(Very small) caveat: could be clearer at times in conveying certain not-so-difficult notions.

It's an overall good course. But I think you may show more uses of tools in this course. And another thing is; English is not the native language for all classes of students here. So if you speak slowly that will be more helpful to understand.

I have learned a lot in this course. It is very nice, but I think that it would be nice if the students can communicate with the teacher directly, because sometimes there are some comments or questions and it is only read it by the group.

Excellent course to kick off learning in GIS. But for me the peer review of assignment seemed a little discouraging. Other than that a great learning experience. If you are interested in GIS, I think you should give it a shot.

This is incredible to complete this course from coursera and my special thanks goes to Nick Santos for delivering the Training. A would appreciate my organisation UNHCR and UNV to pay for all this special skills course.

I never had ideal of what GIS is but this course has really enlightening my view of GIS. And now am proud to say i know what GIS is and to analyse your data with ArcMap. therefore I recommend this to you also.

Thank You

Great course, right what I needed as I use with statistics and econometrics in development issues, but I needed to add the "spatial" element.

I would give the 5th star, if the slide of the lessons were available

thanks!

The course is well laid out and you get access to GIS software for training and studying. The examples are well set up and give a good idea of what you can do with GIS. A complete course manual in pdf would be useful

The course is awesome. I learned a lot and it helped me in many ways. The only thing that can be improved is the peer graded assignment, some students did not follow the instructions on how to grade our work.

Very well instructed. A few of the instructors were hard to understand, but the transcript help in this area. Overall the course was easy to follow and the coursework was challenging for a first timer.