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Learner Reviews & Feedback for R Programming by Johns Hopkins University

4.5
stars
22,170 ratings

About the Course

In this course you will learn how to program in R and how to use R for effective data analysis. You will learn how to install and configure software necessary for a statistical programming environment and describe generic programming language concepts as they are implemented in a high-level statistical language. The course covers practical issues in statistical computing which includes programming in R, reading data into R, accessing R packages, writing R functions, debugging, profiling R code, and organizing and commenting R code. Topics in statistical data analysis will provide working examples....

Top reviews

MR

May 11, 2020

Really interesting course. The interactive coding sessions with swirl are especially useful. Would be great, if you provided sample solutions for the programming assignments, in particular for week 4.

JM

Aug 11, 2019

Very challenging, but good course. I've been programming in R for over a year, but there were still some things for me to pick up in this class. Assignments were a challenge, but satisfying to tackle.

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4551 - 4575 of 4,720 Reviews for R Programming

By lupupa f m

•

Feb 6, 2016

i generally think the course needs a lot of improvement as after week 1 the assignments and quizzes don't seem to relate to the course content. we are at very different levels so a more gentle easing and explanation of ideas is necessary other than this apparent quantum leap from one stage to the next. i have had to do a different course else where and i am getting the sort of good introduction into the R language, its not practical to expect everyone to understand the ideas in 4 weeks.programming is hard enough as it is.

By Nicholas C

•

Aug 24, 2021

Would not reccomend for someone completely new to the program of R. Course is just an hour or more straight of videos covering an expansive number of topics and then a quiz that expects you to remember everything in the videos from hours ago. There should be exercises throughout the course to break in between the videos to reinforce concepts and help you learn as you go. I ended up spending much more time than need be trying to go back and figure out what video each concept needed for a question was covered in.

By Kevin A O M

•

Jul 9, 2020

This course is outdated and the fact that they don't teach you essential libraries like diplyr, tidiverse and ggplot2, makes it harder thant it should be. Learning R should be fun and easier by learning this powerful libraries. Also the lectures are just plain slides with little to no value. They won't teach you the tools you would need to do your assignments so there is a huge gap in difficulty between the material of the courses and the assignments. This is a big struggle for newcomers into R.

By Joel L

•

Feb 19, 2021

Just use the swirl() package on R to learn - the lectures here go too much into irrelevant theory (why teach the history of R for a whole lecture, then only teach us in a minute how to read a file?) Debugging is also talked about at length, and then never tested nor mentioned again.

The assignments provided are also way more advanced than any of the quizzes or practices prepare you for. I spent more time looking up things on youtube, so you might as well learn for free there instead.

By Anthony T

•

Oct 25, 2017

I somewhat resonate with the content expressed in the blog:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-review-of-Coursera-Data-Science-Specialization-Track

1, Not Beginner Friendly, better you are already in the position of Analytic field, Statistician,

2, Instructor read out the slide and I don't feel connection in learning, I resolved to other website for better understanding.

3, However, I would give credit to the only mentor (Len), who is really helping, explaining things in simple way.

By Dr. A D

•

Sep 2, 2019

Exceptionally bad course and worse instructor. I started this course with lots of interest in R and the way it is taught has made my interest much less now. Why is that?

the way videos are explained does not mean anything, It actually makes it harder to understand. the course assignments are very hard and one cannot do unless one learn on his own. Here is the catch the learn on your own is also not explained in the course. The only good thing about the course is the swirl().

By Alessandro B

•

May 24, 2020

R Programming

Week 3

Peer-graded Assignment: Programming Assignment 2: Lexical Scoping

In the peer-graded assignment is requested to completed an exercise using an operator never explained in the lectures, nor in the texbook, nor in the swirl package.

I don't like this learning method having very light lectures and heavy assignments, this is not the way I like learning as I find it very frustrating not to be able to complete the assignments using the material just learned.

By Federico M T

•

Jun 24, 2020

The speaker has his microphone far too close to his mouth so you can hear any(!!!) noises he makes (and he does it a lot!). Further he uses a lot of non necessary commands he does not or just sparsely explain. this would be okay if he wouldnt slip every second sentence or repeat one word several times. He also does not execute code, so you can't see, what the code actually would do. some youtube videos guided me much better than this through basic R. Sad.

By D. M

•

May 20, 2016

This is way too esoteric. The content was delivered way too fast for me to keep up and process it. This needs to be taught with more frequent hands on examples. I'm also not sure why, if auditing, we can't submit and see how we're doing on the learning. I have no way to evaluate if I'm picking up the concepts or not, which is a struggle. Overall, I would not recommend this course for R beginners. I would look elsewhere.

By Roberta D M

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Apr 3, 2021

The course teaches random aspects of R, and you have to guess or look for information elsewhere to solve most of the assignments. The videos are often difficult to follow (you struggle to read what the tutor is typing) and there is no direct practical application. Surely, you need to know already a lot about R or you need to spend a lot of time on other resources to be able to complete the assignment. A lot of wasted time!

By Parker S

•

Jan 28, 2020

There's a major disconnect from the basic teaching material provided and the first big quiz. All of the actions that need to be taken to complete the quiz is not provided in the lesson material. I understand the interest in teaching people how to look elsewhere for help and learn how to ask questions on forums, however as students in this program will be in their infancy in this program, we do not know what to even ask.

By Quoc N

•

Feb 10, 2018

This course is not beginner coding friendly . The assignments contain instructions and code that were not explained in lecture. The first coding assignment has students utilize concepts only found in stickied threads in the discussion board. The second coding assignment also decides to toss another coding function not explained in lecture. I give this a 1 star based on how unsupported I feel by the lecture material.

By Aditya V N

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May 6, 2020

Teacher was super boring and it was difficult to grasp the concepts. I would not recommend this especially to beginners, the course makes it seem a lot more difficult than it actually is, you should try learning from other sources. On top of all that, if what is taught in this course is addition, the assignments are on Laplace Transforms. I had to do a course from somewhere else just to finish this one.

By Bryan T

•

Aug 5, 2019

Instructor routinely introduces new functions while trying to explain another new function, and requires assignment submissions using functions either briefly encountered, or not yet covered. Course would be much improved by using only previously covered functions during explanations, and not blasting many rarely used advanced functions along with more common and practical beginning functions.

By Simon

•

Jan 24, 2023

This course is just infuriating. Some of the videos are good, but what is taught is completely inadequate for the assessments. They seem to use the lousy excuse that they want to develop a "hacker attitude". What does that mean? If I wanted that approach I would just go and learn elsewhere in the first place. Absolute joke. Save your time and money and just do a free online course instead.

By Donald L K

•

Jun 4, 2016

I'm giving this course one star because zero stars is not an option.

I wish I had read course reviews prior to beginning. First assignment was tough... but do-able. Second assignment seems straight forward, but the template they ask that you follow contains small tricks which appear to be FAR BEYOND anything touched on in lectures.

I'm actually going to fight for my money back, what a scam.

By Benjamin L

•

Aug 20, 2016

This course was frustrating, the learning curve nearly vertical, the material dense and inaccessible, and the evaluative assignments impossible for new users of R without outside resources. No one should take this course unless they are powering through it for the Data Science specialization. Otherwise, would-be students should just buy an R For Dummies book, and use materials elsewhere.

By Vernon T

•

Jan 22, 2021

I found this to be the weakest course yet ( poorly guided, poor instructed, and huge assumption of prior R knowlegde. The main issue is that there is NO online chat capability. I spent over 7 hours trying to work out an issue in RStudio and Github all because of the really , really poor instructions. I'm not happy and so much so that I am not going to complete the rest of the modules).

By Omar A (

•

Jun 1, 2018

I did not enjoy this course at all. Even though I work as a software developer, this "Introduction to R" was very boring, and the lack of real examples in the lessons made me very confused as to why we do stuff.

More over, the assignment level comparing to the content in the videos is too high in my opinion.

The only thing I enjoyed through the course was the swirl package.

By Daryl A

•

Sep 11, 2020

If you read the 4 and 5 star reviews they are people who have R experience already. The only prereq for this course is supposed to be regression experience only. This is definitely a learn completely on your own with the videos and text provided by the actual course completely useless. If you are new to R or any programming at all this course will do very little for you.

By Yes I H a N

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Apr 6, 2020

In desperate need of an ISD. Very bad descriptions, the quizzes are not sufficiently built around the lecture content, heavily relies on using an "optional" external module which is vastly superior to the actual course content....but the external module is only presented at the very end. Not impressed. Far too much external searching for unaddressed concepts and ideas.

By Tolani B

•

Aug 20, 2019

This is one of the worst course i have ever taken on coursera, the assignment is so different from what was taught in class, in fact they have nothing in common and the instructor gulps so much and so frequently and he teaches as if he is in a hurry, if there was a lower rating than 1 star, thats what i would have rated it, i spent months on this course. awful

By Aditi M

•

Aug 7, 2017

They say that this course is for beginners, but it's really not! Someone recommended I take this course to get ahead in my career, but honestly it takes hours on end to learn and the slides are unclear as well as lack basic information to learn. I had to use the internet a lot as well as a friend to teach me basic concepts otherwise I would have been lost.

By Iván M F

•

Sep 3, 2022

There is a huge gap between the lectures and the assingments.

Some exercises require the use of knowledge that has never been covered before.

The lessons seem to me to be very theoretical and only cover very basic aspects.

I was expecting for example videos in which the teacher explains how to solve complex exercises.

I'm really disapointed with this course.

By alazarek

•

Jun 1, 2016

Death by power point. If you can learn from essentially listening to a pod cast and reading unix type manual pages, then this course is for you! If you're like the rest of the population, then these lecture videos are useless. The only redeeming quality to this course has been the homework, but you can find them online or come up with them on your own.