The IBM section at the end is depending on the cloud services that sometimes have connectivity issues.

The final assignment needs some editing. The instructions were vague and grammar needs some work.

well structured courses and assignments the quizzes could be more challenging

Peer to Peer assignment was confusing and misleading.

Explanations too cumbersome around APIs

I had some programming knowledge (C++, matlab) when I begun this course. It was easy to complete but I tried to make it more challenging by paying extra attention to the details. The questions that popped up while watching the videos were good at making it somewhat interactive. The quizzes were maybe too easy (most of them had only three questions per quiz). I found the labs very helpful, could use some more practice exercises. It felt like a self-paced course, I would like it if the instructors were more involved in the forums and the grading. Basically, the questions at the forums were answered by fellow students (if someone could help) and also the grading was exclusively by peer-grading. All in all you can gain from the course by putting some personal effort..it also makes it easy to just browse through the questions and get a completed mark nonetheless.

I found the premise of this course effective and the introduction to python and everything it encompasses was great. However, the section on numpy the labs didn't work, it wasn't explained why numpy is so useful in terms of matrix multiplications (am sure we will find out but even just a quick blurb / insight to link understanding), there were no case studies in the latter half which made it just information dumping. And the final section on API also didn't clearly explain why they were so useful. There was a lot that this course could have done - fingers crossed the content improves in terms of explaining larger picture too.

A lot of passive exposure to basic structures of Python , but desperately needs more practice examples and more explicit exercises using code. The instructions for the final activity make a leap several steps past what is presented in the videos and asks that you figure out how to do multiple steps of code without any actual practice coding prior to that. Says its for beginners, but does not teach for beginners. Coursera needs something between Python for Everybody, which is super slow, and something like this, that assumes you intuitively get it.

Although I think the material is really good, I think the content of the quizzes in the videos and the quizzes in Coursera does not prepare you enough for the Lab works in the course. Those quizzes seem too simplistic and then the jump in difficulty in the labs can be frustrating for many. I suggest that the quizzes provide a little more comprehensive detail in a way that tests your understanding but also guides you to doing better jobs at the labs

Weeks one to four are good. Week 5 is full of mistakes. You lose a lot of time for correcting stuff instead of actually learning them. The assignment takes double time just because of the corrections in the given instructions. The data that you have to load in order to complete the assignment are in the wrong address! More examples and coding should be included in week 5.

It might give you all the things that you need for programming in AI and data science but dosent give enough practice to make you feel comfortable with what they teach. They could give few assignments to better the course instead of rushing which overloads the information to be understood and remembered

The assignment is so bad that I had to waste at least 1 hour of time just to figure out why the picture was not changing despite me saving it correctly. I restarted the machine after an hour of research and then it got resolved. THe notebook also behaves weird.

Content is very uneven. Courses range from way too shallow to way too complicated, mistakes in the labs, quizzes questions about subjects that are part of the next chapter... A bit surprising coming from IBM.

The content was good, but as with most online programming courses, there simply are not enough coding exercises to effectively retain the knowledge long term.

The tutorial videos don't go as much into detail, I think you should watch/read some additional tutorials and materials to deepen your understanding

While I enjoyed the labs, the videos do not explain the concepts well. They assume you know certain aspects of python, such as syntax and structure.

Really basic course.

In my opinion it should have more programming assignments and they should be harder.

The final exam had nothing to do with the course at all. Very poorly thought out.

very basic .could be little advanced

The course is super frustrating, the robot voice for the videos makes it so difficult to digest the information, the cadence and focus on certain words is completely wrong, so it makes it so hard to understand, especially when introducing new terms. Given that a lot of the information is presented on slides its really tricky to read at your own pace with the correct intonations and also see the code on the video. It seems really lazy to not have a person with subject knowledge read the video material in a much more engaging way (as with all other Coursera courses I've tried) - this would make the material much easier to engage with and less like I've just installed a text to voice reader on a wikipedia page.

I also think some more real life application based would make it much easier to engage with the material - when I've looked at other courses (e.g. Khan academy, codeacademy, they at least explain 'for loops can be applied for example in XXX'. The labs are good, but the videos have to be some of the least engaging videos on programming that I have ever come across!!

Also, Also, a lot of terms are introduced without any explanation as to their function. In the videos sometimes terms are just introduced on the screen e.g. '_init_ ' but with no explanation whatsoever as to what this means or when it's used. This is meant to be a beginner course and provide knowledge to apply in a workplace setting going forward, but I find myself constantly googling to get background information on Python code. As an example, I messaged my friend (who is teaches python in a university) who gave a brief explanation to 'init: "Short for initialise. When you create an object of any type, you either create a real one or a default one. So for the circle example, a default circle could be the unit circle, but you (as a programmer) may want a 5 inch circle so you would use the class constructor to initialise / override the default values" .

This kind of simple background explanations would go a long way to actually teaching people how to understand what the code is doing, and the background of it and why you use it, so that you are actually more capable of applying this in a future setting. It also helps make the course a lot more human, rather than trying to teach it in a way where you can only remember the code but not actually understand what any of it means or does!

I'm really disappointed with this course, I hope the other IBM python courses are better!!

In general, the material is well presented in this course. If you already know Python programming, probably most notions and examples will seem trivial. The labs are really important to gain a deep understanding of the course material. But you won't get to actually write your own code with a very few exceptions (e.g. the urn problem). The multiple choice graded questions most of the time aren't multiple, aren't randomized (thing peculiar for instructors to omit, in an allegedly data science course), are trivial and don't get deep on the programming aspect. The instructors are almost absent with minimal presence in the forums & discussions. Last week's graded assignment is about compiling an already existing code in the jupyter notebook and you will waste a considerable amount of time trying to submit your work via IBM's cloud rather than actually working on the code itself or on understanding the underlying notions and concepts. In summary, this course certainly has a potential and can be improved on various levels (instructors availability, problem solving, etc.), but if you already know programming I believe this course will be of little to no use for you, except if you want to spend some time and money during lockdowns. If you do not, you will probably get a grasp of the basics of Python programming but, in any case, do not expect to improve your problem solving skills. Nevertheless, if you combine this course with a personal involvement in solving programming problems via Python it will could be beneficial, however I am not sure if it's worth the money.

In my opinion, this course goes all over the place. The video lessons are thrown at you too fast, it's hard to grasp anything really, It's not well structured at all..

I was fortunate enough to have some basic Python knowledge before this, so I could get a thing or two.

The final assignment should be greatly rethought, even scrapped for something that actually lets people put their lessons to good use. The last two weeks are spent on methods and some basic data analysis functions, which is good and all of a sudden we are tasked with making faks album covers...

A good improvement would be to create an assignment which lets people practice a lot of things shown in the course, not copy pasting some code and rewriting a function...

It was very hard for me to follow as I have near to zero programming experience. It's a problem with all Python courses for beginners, on all platforms, it's not for complete beginners really, you need to have the basics of programming prior to that as the instructors in the videos and training materials operate with the terms and concepts that are very hard to understand for non-programmers. The weeks 3 and 4 are especially hard to understand as the complexity of the new terms gets sharply a lot harder to understand, and a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes also give an impression that the authors didn't really review the material before posting it.

The course is a brief whizz through Python and could be good on its own as a refresher for those who already know the basics of Python, however it is the final assessment that spoils the course - this assessment was probably written by different people who did not see the course itself. It does not test your Python skills, but rather your ability to set up IBM Watson Studio and IBM Cloud Object Storage, which is a pretty fiddly service for the uninitiated. Did I learn anything useful from this assessment? Probably not. There are far better Python courses out there, e.g. check out the one from the Higher School of Economics.

Maybe it's a good introductory course for Python, however, I got an impression that the authors gave up three quarters into the course. The labs become more of a reading material rather than a place where you can practice a hands-on approach. The final assessment - omg, I fail to see any relevance between the course material and what is expected in the final assignment! The only lesson I have learnt from it is that I shouldn't trust online courses to learn a subject.

I would not recommend this course to other people.