Even though the video lectures, discussion forums, swirl & reading resources are informative, there is a huge disconnect between the assignments & what is taught. It is impractical for people who have just been introduced to R(with no background in programming) to take up this course.

The graded assignments should be made simpler or should be preceded by smaller ones which help first-timers get used to coding in R. I do not think Swirl; even though a valuable resource; achieves this task remotely.

The level of teaching does not match the level of the assignments. They teach you like you're just going to be quizzed on the vocab and some really simple functions, but then the programming assignments are WAY more complicated than anything they actually taught you. I get that in data science we are supposed to learn how to solve problems, but the instructors shouldn't be intentionally creating problems where we have to go and spend many hours teaching ourselves the material just so we can pass.

It was a little difficult grasping functions as I didn't have much programming background. The swirl practice modules were great but I wish they constructed some lessons that would build a function from top to bottom like we were asked to do in the programming assignments. The lectures, swirl practice modules, and quizzes were great but they all re-iterated the same basic information. I wanted to learn and practice building more functions by applying the basic information to do complex tasks.

The course is OK. This biggest frustration was that lectures were quite unhelpful for the programming assignments they give you. They are not engaging and get very technical very quickly. Be prepared to use extra resources/websites to help get better explanations. The swirl activities are optional for the grade, but a MUST for understanding material--do them. I found that I was able to complete most of the pieces of the course in less time than they tell you next to the descriptions.

1) This course is NOT for beginners in R programming. Huge gap between lectures and assignments. Swirl lessons are cool, but anyway they don't explain enough.

2) I understand that studying is not always a joy, but lectures of this course are boring. First, slides come with brief comments of instructor. And second, it seems like the instructor speaks with no preparation as there are a lot of stammers, tongue slips, "sort of", "kind of" etc. It annoys a lot...

I did learn a lot, but not from the course given and, unfortunately, not from the instructor. I have to google and read through many R docs and articles outside this course to complete the assignments. I know Google is my friend, but I am rating the course :D. The course is somewhat not well-structured. For someone who is really new to R, guidance is extremely important considering there are many paths can be taken to solve data analysis problems using R.

The course is too ambitious and some themes are explained in a very plain and boring way. I can't say you will learn nothing, the course isn't too bad, but if you have no prior experience with programming o even if you have but not in R, the course programming assignments will be a little difficult and the material. If you want to complete this course you will have to invest a lot of time searching for things and/or waiting for help in the forums. 5/10

I learned a lot from this course. My only concern is that, most of the assignments did not match with what was discussed in the lectures. It became difficult for beginners like myself to catch up. It seemed that the lectures were incomplete. I hope this gap between lectures and assignments will be addressed soon. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from this course and now I can say I know something about R programming. Thanks Coursera.

This course's lectures give a good introduction to R programming. However, good practical exercises are missing from the class. The assignments ask a lot of the students, but the lectures come no where near preparing one to complete one of the assignments. The programming skills talked about in lectures are super basic, and then the assingments are far, far more complex.

Difficult to follow and course curriculum not fully in line with the quiz. This course could easily span 6 weeks to avoid information overload and unnecessary time pressure while working full time and with family responsibilities. Optional SWIRL exercises should be revisited between Course 2 and Course 3 as there's very little time within each week.

I learned something, of course, in this course. But without previous experience in data science, I found it OK to understand the lectures, but always got lost in the coding assignments. I tried to finish it on my own, but it turns out I have to search everything online. I felt that there's a big gap between lectures and assignments.

For me as non programmer, the course resulted sometime hard to follow. Simply adding a pointer when Prof. Peng is showing a slide it would improve the understanding.

While the lectures were informative, the programming assignments went way beyond what was covered in the lectures.

This course was not what I've expected. The functions lessons were not achieved, because it was not teached well.

Presenter uses undefined/unexplained terms regularly which most users would not be familiar with.

very good course but you need much more time then announced to finish the assignments

Tutorials are indispensible for students to complete the assignments.

This course is for programmers.

Needs to be more interactive

The lectures themselves were clear and engaging enough and the swirl practice was helpful, but the learning curve between the information we're presented and the assignments is unacceptably steep. I understand that there is always a gap between lecture and application; however, I should not have to sift through a dozen discussion posts to figure out what is going on in the assignments. Students should be able to complete them with just the functions that were covered in the course materials, otherwise, the course materials are insufficient.

My degree is in education and if I had so poorly prepared my students to complete their assignments, then I would get in a lot of trouble. It seems like this has been a complaint for some time and there have been efforts to improve through the resources provided in the forum, but this calls for either rewriting the assessments so they align better with the content that was covered or a fundamental restructuring of the course content so students are prepared to complete the assessments as currently written.

This course was very poorly taught. It has important information, but the course itself doesn't prepare students for the assignments. Not only is the only presentation of information through videos of text, but the professor stumbles over his words so badly not even the subtitles are correct half the time. I honestly feel like I taught myself most of the material. Even if you grasp the presented information, it's not helpful for the assignments. It was like teaching a child their ABCs and then asking for a paper – they technically have the tools, but zero experience and don't even know where to start. This class would be heavily improved if, 1) Information was presented in a textbook-like way for reference and clarity, and 2) There were any sort of guided/practice problems or examples similar to what is expected in the assignments. I love taking classes, but this one was painful for me.

I believe many of the students taking this course might not have any prior coding experience. Personally, I found the assignments quite challenging (rather than intellectually stimulating or providing learning) as many of the issues and syntax used in the assignments were never elaborated in depth in the videos. There may be a few people with really good statistical and coding background, who may not find this review much helpful, But, being new to coding, I can understand this and I believe the people who really need this course to equip themselves with these lessons may not be adept at solving some of the problems asked in the assignments. Please take this constructive feedback into consideration while modifying this course (if you do so). Otherwise, it was a wonderful course and gave same basics to build a foundation in R. Thank you.

Swirl is an amazing learning tool and it was the best of the course. However, unfortunately the course videos and supporting material does not help too much in order to complete the Programming Assignments, specially the videos. There is a huge distance from what has been teached or maybe how it has been teached to what was asked to do during assignments. Nothing against to a good task, but would be fair to provide a proper knoledge (e. g. including examples at same level of the assignments, maybe something step-by-step) so we could complete them without spending so many hours looking for other sources which provide what maybe some of us were expecting to find right here.

The course was somehow frustrating and disapointing on this matter and I don't feel confortable in recommending it.

Not very well organized overall. The assignments were fun, but I had to do extensive research online to find out how to answer the questions being asked, which made me wonder why I had sat through the videos. Sometimes I didn't even use what I learned in the videos to complete that week's assignments. The videos are far too theoretical, they probably would have been useful for someone familiar with R or S, but for a new user they required a lot of rewinding and without practical examples it was hard to actually remember what was being taught. In the rare instance practical examples were given the material stuck much better!

The assignments are not gradual, I mean the content of the classes is not enough for the completion of the assignments. I think I would have appreciated more content in the classes, more explained exercises so that the making of the assignments wouldn't have been so miserable! It's a very hard course.

But I've learned a lot on my own, thanks!