Learner Reviews & Feedback for Functional Program Design in Scala by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

I was optimistic about this course based on the previous course, because that course was consistent, self-contained, and systematic. On the other hand, this course was clearly put together by throwing together, rather haphazardly, bits and pieces of other courses, some of which no longer even exist. This is outrageous; a course like this would never be taught at a prestigious institution like EPFL, and it is highly deceptive to give us a course, put together in a arbitrary, incoherent, Frankensteinish fashion, right after a course that was quite systematic and coherent.

Week one and two were not bad, hence why I gave two stars instead of one. But week three involves a programming project that has literally nothing to do with the lectures at all. To be sure, I didn't mind learning about Scala Check, but I had to do it pretty much entirely on my own; it was mentioned for about five seconds in the lecture videos. If I wanted to just read documentation without any actual teaching, why would I sign up for a course like this?

And week 4! Coursera/whoever put this course together isn't even trying anymore. The videos are clearly from multiple different courses, and Odersky himself makes references entire weeks worth of content that simply doesn't exist anymore. This is a damn mess. In its current state, the course is simply not worth publishing.

For what its worth, the removed lecture videos can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMhMDErmC1TdBMxd3KnRfYiBV2ELvLyxN

But these videos do not contain the removed exercises/programming projects, unfortunately.

The 3rd and 4th week were clearly improved upon since the last reviews noted a sense of disorganisation: now they are well structured and fit in well with the overall course. The course as a whole is well balanced and interesting!

The course starts well and has really good exercises, HOWEVER at weeks 3-4 the lectures lose their logical order, it feels like a collection of random lectures from other course syllabus that have been "reused" here.

Week 3 exercise has very little to do with the lectures, and week 4 lectures are even worse, martin says he'll talk about 1 thing that is later not in the course, then we switch to someone else that talks about "things we've seen before" - which we haven't!

Don't get me wrong, you can still learn a lot from this and understand most of it, but it just feels very unprofessional, glad I've only audited this course and didn't pay for it, if that was the case I would feel very disappointed

Very boring and unorganized course. It feels like it is a mix of two older courses that no longer exist.

This almost made me feel like I was back in college, with those unbelievably boring lessons and project subjects from 30 years ago.

It seems that this course was partially updated, but it was not done in a seamlessly way. I think this course deserve a full remake, if possible with the same instructor all the time.

A sharp decline in quality and cohesion from the Functional Programming Principles in Scala course. It may be worth enrolling just to hear Odersky's elegant lecturing at work once again, but if you're interested in the core concepts, I would highly recommend picking up a highly rated book instead.

Mish-mash of everything. Disconnected lectures and assignments. Week4 is plain horrible - assembled from random lectures that refer to non-existing context. One hour of random lectures does a very bad job of introducing reactive programming.

Scala is so different from traditional imperative languages, such as C++, sometimes it looks like magic to me from its compact but powerful expression. The hard part is the way of thinking is different. This course is from the father of the language, he explained insights of many ideas well. The homework is hard, but doable, if you put in some efforts, you feel you gain a lot. I love Scala.

In order to save time I will quote this other review By Abhinav P. that reflects 100% what I think:

"I was optimistic about this course based on the previous course, because that course was consistent, self-contained, and systematic. On the other hand, this course was clearly put together by throwing together, rather haphazardly, bits and pieces of other courses, some of which no longer even exist. This is outrageous; a course like this would never be taught at a prestigious institution like EPFL, and it is highly deceptive to give us a course, put together in a arbitrary, incoherent, Frankensteinish fashion, right after a course that was quite systematic and coherent.

Week one and two were not bad, hence why I gave two stars instead of one. But week three involves a programming project that has literally nothing to do with the lectures at all. To be sure, I didn't mind learning about Scala Check, but I had to do it pretty much entirely on my own; it was mentioned for about five seconds in the lecture videos. If I wanted to just read documentation without any actual teaching, why would I sign up for a course like this?

And week 4! Coursera/whoever put this course together isn't even trying anymore. The videos are clearly from multiple different courses, and Odersky himself makes references entire weeks worth of content that simply doesn't exist anymore. This is a damn mess. In its current state, the course is simply not worth publishing."

This course is really disjointed. Unlike the first course in Scala Functional Programming specialization, this course is stitched together from bits and pieces of other courses. The lectures make reference to other lessons that no longer appear in the course, and the assignments frequently have nothing to do with the lecture material.

This course is evidently hacked together from pieces of other courses. Not nearly as well put together as the previous from the specialization which was excellent. The specialization could benefit from having this module reworked from scratch.

The presented material wasn't coherent for me, I didn't walk away with knowledge of functional design principles for larger/complex software. The topics presented seems just a bunch of topics next to each other.

Apart from the topics like Future and Stream, I haven't found it very interesting. The part on the Digital Circuits for instance for me was not relevant, given that I studied micro-eletronics and engineering.

There wasn't that much content to this course. I realise it was the result of some restructuring and the previous version might have been more complex, right now it seems very little content for the price.

Should really have been included in the first part of the specialization. Exercises were also not demanding enough and did not cover enough of the material in the lectures

The 3rd and the 4th Week courses need to be looked at as the Assignments and the video lectures are not in sync and many videos are missing. The 1st 2 weeks are good.

The videos referenced lectures that were not included in the course. Homework did not relate to material from the videos. Some of the videos contained little content.

The course was still useful and with new information but I really found it lacking cohesion with the overall specialization and with its own content.

It's mixed from previous courses on Scala. Not coherent, many unrelated topics with little explanation of their importance and real-world use cases.

It seems that this course may have been neglected and gotten stale/out of sync. Some of the did not match the lessons.

The mix of materials from different courses hurts the structure of this course.

Several courses have been combined. Content is not updated. Now is 2016.

Not very interesting

In fact, this is an inconsistent attempt of re-implementing previous FRP course from the same authors. FRP course had many issues about homework/lectures being poorly related, this one is even worse. This is very frustrating, as a topic itself is one of the most interesting ones in today's software engineering.

It is terrible compared to the first one: bad course structure, assignment mismatch, there is no mentioned of RxScala anywhere.