Although the information on the course states that it requires no prior programming knowledge, that statement isn't accurate. You will quickly become lost in the assignments and questions as they are a not a logical progression from the lecture material. The instruction from Mr Peng is all over the place and doesn't give you a good understanding of the language. I found SWIRL to be 100% more helpful. But looking at the upcoming materials, you need to have a solid background in programming to complete this specialization. Which SHOULD have been told to students prior to them spending money on the course. I would NOT recommend this course to anyone.

Videos are poorly narrated and are marginally effective: vocabulary + key concepts only. The "swirl" exercises are woefully inadequate to prepare students for the quizzes. Foundational tasks (i.e. establishing a valid connection to the sample data) are conspicuously absent from the guided exercises; leaving too many students to seek help from message boards and google. Lastly, the "professors" are completely unreachable: they may as well be dead. After 30 years in the IT industry, I found this course to be profoundly aggravating and a complete waste of my time - I have abandoned this course and bought a "Teach Yourself" book instead.

If you enjoy floundering helplessly and feeling incredibly stupid, this is the course for you. Expect a few slides on basic concepts (all of which you need a VERY large screen to read because they seem to all be in 8 point font), and then get flung full force into coding. There are no worked examples. You might as well just buy a Reilly book. My partner and I both wanted to learn R for econometric analysis. He can do more after a 1 day seminar than I can do in a month struggling with this course. I had considered pursuing a graduate degree at Johns Hopkins, but if this is the level of instruction I can expect, then no chance.

not the model of learning that is encouraging or sticks. hard for a student (even one who has a programming background) to sit through hours of slides explaining what the functions and definitions in the language do without a layer of use context upfront.

The content jumps from specific examples to unrelated specific definitions without carrying a sense of integrating the new knowledge with any past knowledge in the course. the whole course seems disjointed.

would have been much more effective as learning through examples and to be taught functions and definitions as they come up in problem solving.

The lectures and Swirl exercises are extremely easy to understand and follow, but then the assignments are incredibly complicated and difficult. The assignments ask for techniques that aren't focused on or even covered in the lectures. The tips offered by Al Warren in the Discussion forum make the assignments possible to do. Since the tips are so critical to understanding and completing the assignments, I think Al Warren's tips should be incorporated as part of the core course. This course needs more time to be covered in depth - it's a lot of ground to cover in just one month,

Course does not do a good job actually explaining R or training you on how to properly use it. The lectures go over the material very fast and you do not get much out of them, and then the assignments throw complex problems that are very difficult. You spend most of your time Googling to learn it, and I find that I would have learned R better if I just did that to start without this course. Maybe if you aren't new to R and have a programming background, it may not be so bad, but if you are new to R and not an experienced programmer, this is not the class to take to learn it.

Firstly, the level of assignments which are given are vey tough. This is due to the fact that the topics that are taught in the videos are of amateur level and the assignments are more than advanced level. No link between what is taught and what is asked. I am new to programming and i dont think person like me would recommend other to take this course. Even guys who has background in R would find this tough. I spent more time reading blogs and discussion forums than time spent on watching the course videos. WONT RECOMMEND TO OTHERS. STRONGLY UNSATISFIED.

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.

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.

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.

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().

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The worse Coursera course I've ever taken. The videos feel like someone reading the technical documentation to you, the "interactive" tutorials are like an 1980s text-only game, and the assignments require massive leaps in ability over what you learned in the lessons. I would call this course "Advanced-level assignments sure to both bore and frustrate people new to R"

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