Learner Reviews & Feedback for Tools for Data Science by IBM

The content is a good intro into the tools that you are gonna use in a data career. However, I did have two major issues here where:

1) As IBM moved to Watson Studio from Data Science Experience, this did create some of the visuals and knowledge a bit outdated.

2) There was a massive disconnect when you have issues working Watson; especially with signing up and logging in. I see that this was a huge issue since then (judging by reading the discussion sections of the course) and this (along with my first point0 should definitely be discussed if you want this content to still provided.

It is a very quickly course, the week of the open source tools it's seen really quick, you can barely understand anything and they put three different tools in one week, if you really want to learn them search another course; it is also a big propaganda for de IBM tools, and they put so much more effort on selling you the idea that their products are really necessary that in actually introduce you to the tools that a data scientist use, and its so hard to understand if you don't speak english as your mother language, hope that with time they can fix it.

This course is not good. It has taken me several times the amount of time specified due to the outdated videos that no longer represent the tool as provided. Struggling to get simple markdown commands to work in the notebook, but I successfully executed them in the previous toolset. Several back and forth's between the actual work and the videos is very aggravating. It would be nice if you at least provided some printable instructions. I feel that I have gotten off track and may not be able to find my way back to a normalized starting point.

Very patchy. Some of the videos were quite informative but the practical exercises were a real problem. Often the instructions were impossible to follow as the software must be a newer version than that shown in the instructions. I had to Google for the latest instructions. Also the practical exercises rarely told you *why* you were learning anything; it said "type in this code" but you didn't understand the code. I was able to finish the course but only through sheer perseverance (and Googling for instructions) - it was not enjoyable.

This course at one time would have been great. However, for myself and many others (based on numerous discussion posts during my time taking the course), there was a multitude of technical errors and outdated training. Zeppelin Notebooks was not a working functionality in the IBM Skills Network, and most of the walkthrough guides were unhelpful due to updates in the tools being showcased. The course is in need of some serious updating to catch up on many changes that have impacted the tools covered in this course.

Material in this course looked like part of something else. It's a beginner's course but suddently I'm faced with a lot of technical jargon with no explanation. I supposed to experiment with software and code I've never seen or know how to interpret and I'm just suppose to run it to see what happens. I have no idea what I was supposed to learn from it. Week 2 was demotivating and added nothing to my knowledge. This week was an absolute loss of time. I still learned something from week 1 and 3

give one plus star with benefits of the doubt. If the course gets better in next courses but this is a shame. I can deal you promote IBM services and products, no matter with that, but you only give ALL the tools existing in the data science world and meanings, but with no knowledge is a none sense. Hope you improve, Basic stuff for analytics, statical or regression models, clustering I have no clue what they are. But well the name is tools for data science. No how to use them or what for.

The course needs to be updated. Especially the IBM Watson Studio section is something which needs to be worked on again. The site they refer to has hanged completely. IBM site was not user friendly and caused a lot of confusion. It took a lot of time to figure it out. This problem is not isolated and there have been a lot of users who are struggling to figure out how to solve it. This causes additional problems as the final assignment depends on getting started with the IBM website.

Overall intro for open source tools that could be four stars if updated for current layout and usage of its star tool, IBM Watson. The inaccurate videos for Watson make this course very frustrating, and moreso because the final, graded project is expected to be completed on Watson despite the course's acknowledgement that the lectures need updating for that tool. It's doable, thanks to the other students posting tips in the discussion forums.

5 stars for the first two weeks, but the week about Watson is just terrible. The discussion board is full of complaints.

IBM should not promote itself this way.

Coursera should not spread this content and charge for it. It's a rip off.

The videos are totally outdated and it took literally hours and looking on the discussions on how to get to the point that I could do the application and the final assessment. IBM wasted my valuable time here.

I am personally found it very difficult to create a notebook on IBM Watson because course take the tutorial videos from IBM Watson itself without checking whether there is any updates where the UX changed significantly. I have to research Google and forums to find out the ways to create a notebook on IBM Watson. I hope that this review will help the authors of the course find it easier to update the course content.

Too much lip service to too many tools. After the first course in the specialization sets expectation that no tech or programming skills are essential as pre-requisites, this course comes along and introduces in the briefest possible way a plethora of tools.

The course will benefit by focusing on only IBM tools and one example from the open source world rather than the mention of so many tools all around the place.

Well structured layout and solid indications of what the knowledge necessary for a learning path to data science. Which is appreciated as there is a lot information out there and difficult to filter out the noise. The course however is very light and lacks some real educational information. The content would need to be 'beefed' up considerably. And more rigorous quizzes and questions needed.

A lot of good information here which should have been rated higher, but everything took so much longer than it ought to have, because it was so poorly presented. The materials are outdated (or missing/difficult to find with the IRIS dataset) and difficult to follow. The course needs a complete update and overhaul by someone who understands online learning and user interface/user experience.

What they explain in video doesn't have similarity in accessing the real assignment, since its a paid course, they should at least review the content yearly the least.

It took away 2 days to figure it out on my own, in order to complete the assignment, and also disappointing there is no easy access to help of coursera.

Wasted a lot of time and energy, looks like learnt this one on my own.

It is basically just a brief overview off the interface and a narrator who reads the text of the tutorial. some of the R video's are out of sync. The Watson Studio one is so outdated that you have to find out yourself how the program works instead of watching a good introduction. overall I've learned nothing this entire course besides opening the program and clicking on the tutorial.

From Week 2 to Week 3 some video is not clear, not understable and not enough for video explanation. Some video rectiure video and voice is not clear voice. So, it is very difficult understand how to use IBM Watson studio. And, final assignment also is not enough information from lad. I have to check other outside site for IBM Watson studio Juypter notebook how to process and use.

The course was ill-prepared - the videos were annoyingly long while not being too informative; big part of the course was simply an IBM marketing content. To conclude the course, the student has to sign up for an IBM service however the instructions are unclear and the sign-up path proposed by the course instructors is faulty, resulting in not being able to fulfil the assessment.

As a total and complete beginner when it comes to most things data science, computers, coding, programming, etc., this course was very challenging. It felt unorganized, overwhelming, and filled with jargon. I eventually started putting things together by the end of the course, but it took me a lot longer and a lot more effort (and stress) than I would have liked.

The tools and website is sometimes hard to connect, and has maintenance/update very often and it made it extra difficult for us new comers to follow up without step by step guide to the new features, which prolonged the course and it wasn't very necessary.

But I did learn a lot from this course hopefully the tools and guides get better for the future students.

If you are going to create a class, please DOUBLE CHECK everything periodically. We have found most of what you are telling us is wrong and are having to learn by trial and error. I feel sorry for those who do not have a background in computers or speak english. They have to be very frustrated by your outdated instructions that do not work. I know I am.

The Skills Network Lab never once worked for me while I was enrolled in this course. While I have Jupyter Notebooks and RStudio available to me via an Anaconda installation, and could therefore follow along to most of the lessons, installing Zeppelin locally proved to be too difficult for me, and thus I have no hands-on experience with Zeppelin thus far.

This course came too early. I was overwhelmed with the number of tools covered as part of this which was not required especially the functionality part of each tool. This was the time I was about to quit as it was getting too much. It is better to focus on one tool and once you grasp the concepts of data science, it is easy to replicate across tools

Too much content that was not accurate, (i.e. time to actually re-record the videos vs just having all those notes that say they're the same - the navigation on the IBM site is different now, so it's not just a title - time to rerecord). Also, found that a decent amount of it was a rehash of things in the first class in the certification.

The course says suitable for beginners but by Week 2, it becomes apparent that this is not actually the case. I was able to finish the course, but with great difficulty and a lot of research outside of the modules to understand this. There should have been a bit more of an introduction to the skills that would have been needed further on.