Learner Reviews & Feedback for Machine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach by University of Washington

lacture was good but one point i want to share to you don't use rare tools for assignment personally i faced lots of problem while installing graphlab better to switch to some common tools like sklearn python platform .

It is a good course if we take into account the foundational part. But since only one library has been used to solve the issues, one does not explore and write their own functions.

the course concepts were good but as everyone is saying the materials are outdated and you use TuriCreate instead of GraphLab so you have to search for the appropriates functions some times, and the installation was hard too because TuriCreate works only on Linux or WSL, I almost quit the course because I couldn't install it at first

The material in this course severely needs an update. Some of the code examples (not from the video, because the video is obviously from old materials) are problematic. It's an interesting experience to learn a new library but I wish the experience is different. The quiz should be tougher in my honest opinion.

Great introduction course. However, getting the notebooks to work with Graphlab is a real pain. The notebook exercises are also mostly make-work rather than real explorations. The explanations and the notebooks themselves are pretty good though

Excellent Theory. Very clear explanations with simple yet powerful examples. Sadly the practical part is not nearly as good. Mainly because of the tool used. If this was implemented in Scikit-Learn, the course would be excellent overall.

the course seems outdated in many aspects, the support isn't available to clarify doubts and the documentation isn't updated either. Moreover, the software support has ended.

A good course, but the tools are a bit dated and it's showing its age.

It is interesting, but turicreate isn't compatible with current version of python (3.8) and there's little/no support as the forum is not curated and not much student interaction. The problems seem to be only loosely related to the material. Many questions in the problems aren't discussed in the lectures and turicreate isn't widely used so it is difficult to find explanations or clues on how to proceed.

I think this course is outdated as they are using python 2 also the platform they use for machine learning only supported by python 2. Due to these limitations, I too was unable to continue this course. Because every time you have to work with new libraries you have to uninstall python 2 and reinstall python 3.

Instructors or TAs are not available in discussion forums. and the course is focussed on promoting "graph lab" proprietary package of the course sponsor. Maybe you can have a look, not beneficial if you are serious about learning ML.

This course has used windows OS and application built for it. But the library/application is no longer supported on windows. So this is really a big problem for windows users.

Overly relies on a paid software (free for the course) called GraphLab. The course can be completed without GraphLab, but expect little / no responses to questions.

excessive use of GraphLab create which is not an industry standard.

Two stars because of GraphLab! Otherwise great concepts!

IF you are a beginner who would like to take up a job in a Data Science related field, read on:

The packages used here are not listed in a single job requirement in Angel, Glassdoor, etc. I know they said use the tools you want to, but most people taking up courses like this or similar are people with none or limited experience in Machine Learning. Rather than promoting tools created by the professor (Turi; Read the Wikipedia page, it seems like an advertisement) they need to use tools that are widely used in the industry.

(Though Turi has been acquired by Apple, the scope is very limited)

Furthermore, due to lack of proper support and solutions on sites like Stack Overflow, it gets harder for a person who lacks programming experience to debug if any problems arise

**THE BIGGEST ISSUE: Turi is NOT SUPPORTED on Windows!** I had to use a virtual environment in Ubuntu Terminal. (I may be wrong with the exact wording) For finding out how to use the package read this:

https://blog.usejournal.com/installing-turicreate-on-windows-10-534e147a4792

(Funny thing, the author of the page actually wrote "If you are taking the Machine Learning Foundations: A Case Study Approach", meaning someone would rarely use it for anything else IF they do)

Concept Explanation was good, but the above point was a major disappointment because I had to learn packages like Pandas and Scikit-Learn (Any job listing on Machine Learning using Python would list these as a MUST requirement. Besides, the support available on Stack Overflow is huge) after learning a package I would never use in my job.

So my suggestion is if you don't mind learning Turi and would like a surface level explanation of the concepts, go on.

Extremely disappointed with the quality of the teaching content. There is a major disconnect between the materials presented in the videos and quizzes. While there is a warning that there has been a shift from graphlab to turicreate, there is no way to assess the impact on additional effort required to fill in the gaps. In fact, one of the instructions in the week 2 programming assignment is outright wrong so you will be able to pass quiz. The discussion board is tough to navigate because of the subject heading are cryptic e.g. Need help, Error, etc. As a result one has to sift through many post to get an answer. Compared to other offering on Coursera, It is not worth paying for this course.

This course would be okay if it weren't for turicreate, a Python package that's supposed to simplify things. If you have Linux or a Mac, it will do just that, but if you have Windows steer well clear of this course. The lecturers haven't considered the possibility that anyone might not have Linux or a Mac. All the faffing around getting turicreate to work (I did it once and I'm not doing it again) wasn't worth my trouble so I ended up guessing the answers to the quiz questions (you're allowed three attempts every eight hours) just to get this course out of the way. I'll use something actually accessible for the remaining courses, namely R.

The files that are given in readings are unable to open and turicreate cannot read that files also. I cant complete my assignments without reading those files. They haven't given any detailed explanation about how to read those files. In videos they had explained through csv files but in assignments they had given sframe file which are unable to read

The learning tools and environment is not friendly. The use of graph lab seem outdated since python 3.7 does not seem to support the module. I suggest the course be reviewed. Python 2.7 seem to be going out of the system so something should be done about this

The course is limited to use special package - turicreate, sframe, no detailed explanation of how to install that. Packages used are very out dated

Dato tool does not even install properly.. so n´makes no sense to continue with the course. The support team fail to help in installing ... :-(

The course is explained using turicreate , which does not work in windows properly. It should have been explained using open source libraries.

Uses very old versions of libraries. Many students are facing issues which remains unsolved. Not recommended to pursue it.

graphlabcreate creates many problem while working..it should be changed