Learner Reviews & Feedback for Text Retrieval and Search Engines by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

I have learned a lot of concepts through this course, but at a shallow level. It is a great introduction course to IR. It can be improved by adding more programming tasks for hands-on exercise

Excellent lecture material with many very interesting concepts. Instructor clearly talks about topics and why they're important. -1 star due to: content being on quizzes before being covered in lecture, compilation errors in the programming assignments, errors in submitting programming assignments, and lack of instructor support/feedback on the discussion forms.

Was interesting

I found that there were a lot of mathematical function in this course. I need to see the examples of how are those functions applied in the real programming which support the business.

Good theoretical course. Some exercises need to be fixed, as they count for approval and are misplaced.

it's theoretical rather than practical

This course goes through the basics of text retrieval systems with an appropriate speed. However, the contents are quite out-dated for 2019.

very hard to understand teacher

Lectures are fine for those who does not want to read a book and want to get a quick overview. Quizzes are very un-useful and buggy. There are questions presented that are not covered in the section. Programming assignments are optional because instructor did not want to adapt them for Coursera format so that they can be completed using tools of choice.

The quiz content is out of sync with the lecture content and has not been fixed after what appears to be 2 years of comments in the course error message board and weekly discussion boards.

Interessant, but it wasn't organized too well. Some questions referred to topics which came in the next lesson

I expected more exercises

The course was great. What I had a real problem with was the lack of response for problems with the Honors programming assignments. I never received any feedback from the TA's and when I submitted to MeTa support, they said the school design the programs so they can't help. I got a Segmentation Fault on Assignment one which I never did get resolved. Because of this, I was unable to get the Honors status.

Ok. It was a rerun and there wasn't much help in the Forum and there were too few exercises. But it was really interesting.

Very theoretical and somewhat dry. If you are interested in applied machine learning techniques (for text retrieval and analysis) this is not really the course to take. Gives a solid background though which, in my opinion, every aspiring data analyst needs.

Too much theories ,I hope the professor add more programming assignment.

i like the theory, wish more hands on with some softwares

不得不说， 老师讲课讲得的很好，内容丰富，逻辑性很强，非常清晰。这一点很难得，因为我听过太多天马行空的课了。

但是Honor Track 有着灾难性的问题。因为当前的作业源代码已经和最新的ＭＥＴＡ　不再兼容了，　作业源代码版本太旧。运气不好的话，学生要花巨量的时间来安装调试，　处理各种ｄｅｐｅｎｄｅｎｃｙ　的问题，　而这些根本不是学这门课所要做的。看看ｄｉｓｃｕｓｓｉｏｎ　ｆｏｒｕｍ　里吧，哀鸿遍野。另外，在平常的作业里会有些低级错误，　连Ｍｅｎｔｏｒ　都无法自圆其说。希望能够及时纠正这些错误，不然真的可惜了这么好的内容。　本来要给五星的，两颗星就扣在这些地方。

excellent material and great explanations! The main problem here is that quizzes will sometimes cover subjects not introduced until the following week.

Essentially a very interesting and well structured course. Unfortunately, its honours track programming assignments are plagued by technical issues, and there are inconsistencies between the schedule of the video lectures and what is asked in the quizzes.

I got the sense that this course needs to be updated. Some of the quizzes covered work that had not been treated up to that point and the programming assignment did not work with the most recent version of the MeTA toolkit. For a course of this stature I would have expected a lot more attention to such detail. It would also appear as though the owners of the course material are not present on the forums with students left to their own devices.This course as well as the Text Mining one does not compare well with the Machine Learning course from Stanford offered on Coursera when considering the above issues.Some work is required I believe

The course does not give much of practical knowledge, mostly theoretical. For example, presented material does not teach you what is required to build a good search engine. Even theoretical part is mostly based on old view, which is proven to be not working. For some topics the exam was given before the topic was presented in lectures.

Some courses lack lecture notes. There are some mistake in the week exercise (some question regarding topic in wk5 appears in wk4). So the overall feeling for the course is not well considering it is a part of the school's graduate program

The course conveys a lot of well-structured content. The theoretical concepts are taught well by the videos, although some videos are a little bit too long.

Unfortunately, I was not able to do the practical assignments due to technical problems with the installation of the required development environment. I missed experiencing in practice what I have learnt in theory.

Heavily focused on formulas. I prefer courses which focus on basic concepts more.