Learner Reviews & Feedback for R Programming by Johns Hopkins University

The lectures and swirl assignments are great for the programming level, however there is a HUGE disconnect between the level at which the course is taught and the programming assignments that are given for the course. I am all for a challenge, but I believe that the tools necessary to think through and apply to the programming assignments are not provided in a good manner. I think there needs to be more practice that bridge that gap between the swirl assignments and the programming assignments.

The content and the speed that they teach you R are actually good. But considering that we now have to pay 45€/49$ for the course you will expect more polished videos and quizzes. Some of the videos are just stutters, repetitions and filling words. It's seems like they have been in a rush without decent preparation. Also one of the quiz questions was simply wrong. This should be fixed. Furthermore some of the commands they present are deprecated and cannot be used anymore.

This course is a little too deep into programming and a little light on learning the basics of R. I would recommend splitting out the more advanced programming concepts in this course and offering them in a course near the end of the specialization.

This course should be higher level and give the user a wider view of R. Currently this course seems to assume significant knowledge of R or programming in general, making it not a good early course in the specialization.

Good intention but the programming assignments were much much harder than what was covered in the mostly theoretical lectures and the more practical but not as advanced swirl exercises. After reading other reviews of this course, and struggling to complete the FIRST programming assignment, I canceled. Please do not advertise this as for beginners - I think people who have had some programming experience before would find this great, but not for the newbie.

The videos aren't narrated by a robotic voice-over, which is good! Unfortunately, they are very simplistic and not actually that helpful at teaching R functions. The swirl package they have you use is actually a much better way to cover the source material, and I advise doing all the exercises. Unfortunately the programming assignments are very random and don't really apply what you have just been taught, so all in all I do not recommend this course.

This is NOT a step-wise introduction to R for the novice. Useful in many respects, but the uninitiated to the field need more time, slow increments in project difficulty and more thorough, step by step explanations. I think the designers of the course wrongly assume that ALL R programming should be taught in THIS course which is erroneous; it should be about laying the foundations, on which the student can then expand his/her R programming abilities.

I found this course to be very poorly structured. Although the lecture material was interesting and engaging, very simple examples, functions and codes were presented in lectures and the assignments were completely at a different level. I spent hours researching online to be able to complete assignments. This should not be the case for an introductory course and I do have programming experience, although not in R. Very disappointing and frustrating.

I found that material presented in the course initially seemed useful. However, the programming assignments go far beyond what was presented in the learning modules and optional practices. I recognize that additional research is common in coding projects, but I found this major feature of the course to be unnecessarily painful and ultimately unhelpful. Only do this course if you absolutely have to. I believe there are better ways to learn R.

The course is interesting, but is very focused on informatics and programming codes, it is not recommended for beginners. If you are looking for a course on statistical programming in R it is not this course. It is a good idea to give the manual for free, although some lessons are tedious and long. It also requires some previous handling of GitHub to complete it, for those of us who are not familiar with the environment is really complicated.

Do not attempt this course unless you have a strong foundation of programming.

Although the lectures and initial quiz sections are straightforward and step by step, once you get to the assignments, there is a massive leap where concepts and commands that have not been introduced in the lectures are required.

There is also no support or way of getting guidance apart from a blanket google search.

This is hugely dispiriting and demotivating.

I learned a lot from the course. The reason I only give it two stars is that the programming assignments are close to impossible for someone with no prior experience. I expected to be able to complete them since the data specialization indicated that beginners should be able to complete the courses. Overall, I learned a lot, but the programming assignments were a very frustrating experience that did not add to the value of the course.

I passed this course with score 95% finished all quizzes, Programming assignments and swirl exercises. but it wasn't useful that much. the videos wasn't interactive, to much theoretical parts...less practical you can't solve the assignments depending on the tutorials you have to google for the answers and know how people can solve the problems.......I recommend if there will be a new version to put these points in consideration

This is a tougher class than advertised. I essentially had to clear my entire week's plans to complete the first week's assignment, which was by far the toughest. There needs to be more testing on a variety of incoming skill sets. The lectures can also benefit from a recalibration, because the lecturer speaks way too fast for newbies and speaks fastest when explaining the most complex concepts. This makes it tough to learn.

This is not an "R for beginners" course. Be prepared to spend a lot of time learning things on your own. The lectures don't prepare you very well for the quizzes and assignments. However, there is some useful information about R here. Any previous experience in another programming language will be an asset to you in this course, as you need to understand some programming concepts already to complete the assignments.

OMG, talk about throwing you in the deep end with weights on your feet. Holy Sh!t. Course 2 week 2, there would be no way a beginner programmer would get any of this pollution project. i must have spent 12 hours trying to figure it out. There were functions i have never seen, script no beginner would ever know. I do not know how long i can keep this up. Even swirl was over my head... skip(), skip()... BRUTAL!

I came in with not much experience in R and while I found the lectures and the swirl practice problems to be pretty helpful, the assignments were way too difficult for me to understand on my own. This was my first experience with an online course and while I knew I would be teaching myself, I felt stuck while doing some of the assignments and had to use google to help me with practically the whole assignment.

The course suffer the time passed form his first edition; it seems it is abbandon by his editors without improve it in the years. I think the course is not well focused on very important aspects of R programming; moreover the support material and the programming assignment are not well designed and documented, you need to train yourself on other site or in the forum to learn how to face up with assignment.

Not a great course for beginners tbh.... it jumped a bit from topic to topic and all of a sudden certain jargon was used making it difficult to follow some parts of the lecture. Course work does not match with lectures and SWIRL. It's frustrating that you can't apply the things you've learned in the lectures and apply it to the course work... this should be greatly improved. Only really good thing is SWIRL

This is not an introduction to R programming... this is more in-depth than just introduction... in week 2 we're asked to compute and program to read multiple files at once with very specific functionalities!... this is not an introduction to R programming whatsoever... also it requires a lot of user reading from other sources i.e. google, stack overflow... etc... I don't recommend this to newbies

The course content and swirl online assignments are at the beginner level, but I feel the assignments are above the beginner's level. The assignments do not align to the course content and the forum has little value added due to the congestion with people asking for assignment reviews. Recommend stating in the course content the appropriate section in the book (for those who buy the book).

The course itself is not bad, even if many materials are quite incomplete and lack more detailed explanations. Morever, I found some tasks way too complicated if compared to the lecture contents. I would implement the course by structuring it in a way that the students can practice more through easier exercises right after each lesson. Nonetheless, I partially appreciated this course.

I have a Masters Degree in an unrelated field, however, I consider myself intelligent and this was very difficult from the beginning to understand. It may be because I have no experience in either coding or R, but I was completely lost. I was planning on completing the Data Scientist Track, but have decided to go back to the basics and discontinue Coursera at this point.

The workload and the structure of the course was vastly different from the previous session. I had a very hard time to follow and to keep up with the pace at times and had to play catch up often. I wish there were more exercises to help the students familiarize with core functions and concepts instead of throwing them into the deep end and wait for them to "grind it out."

Las evaluaciones no tienen el mismo nivel que las clases. Se ven temas en los videos para que a la hora de hacer el examen se introduzca (breve y muy pobremente) otras funciones y estructuras que nunca se mencionaron antes. Durante los videos se muestras funciones que se ven hasta semanas mas tarde. No recomiendo el curso. Aprendi mas por medio de los modulos de swirl.

I'm finishing the course happy due to the certificate, but I am also very frustrated. The assignments are very unfair when compared to lecture contents. If you don't have any previously knowledge in R, it is very difficult to conclude the course. In addition, the auxiliar materials are in the week forum, and not as obligatory readings. I am very upset and frustrated.