Compared to the other Coursera course I attended ,this one is by far the least useful one. The instructor is super brief and his slides are mostly made of a list of acronyms!

I would not recommend it until they make some serious changes to the content and presentation of material.

This course is not interesting when compared to previous courses 1,2 and 3. Its hard to comprehend the lectures and the training videos provided for Microstrategy doesn't provide much support when it comes to assignments. I feel that the overall exposure to Microstrategy tool we get through this course is very minimal.

Is this course an advertisement for Microstrategy ? A lot of videos come directly from the company. I don't have anything against that company, but business and learning are 2 very different things. The link with Microstrategy seems to have led to lazyness : so many low-effort contents (assignments directly taken out of the Microstrategy website, poor structure of shared documents, etc.), endless auto-promotion of the book of the teacher. I really felt like the CEO of Microstrategy was kind enough to share with me his views on BI (which might be the goal of Microstrategy with their partnership with the university). I am not happy having paid for this. The other courses of the specialization are great though. Please remove and rework this particular Course 4 from the specialization.

The Course is well laid out with plenty of assignments that allow you master the BI by using Microstrategy. Thanks to professor Karimi, it was by far the best BI course that I have ever taken.

This was a fun course, but too short in my opinion. It would have been better if there were more assignments that didn't have step by step instructions, so that we can learn by doing more efficiently.

I can honestly say I feel througoughly disappointed in this course. First of all, the teacher has a very difficult accent to follow, which wouldn't be so bad if at least the closed captions were accurate themselves. Second, the material taught feels very generic and theoretical, without a single good example to give them some context. The addtitional material and lecture notes feel very dated too, which is evident as the field of Business Intelligence has rapidly evolved over the decade. Finally, learning MicroStrategy is probably the only good outcome of taking this course, but even so there are quite detailed free tutorials in the web that could do that. All in all, this course is in big contrast with the previous courses of the specialization as a learning experience, and I would advise Coursera and the University to make an effort and update it.

The course has some good technical and analytical understanding of BI tools and application plus the BI project helped me derive useful visualizations. This course has helped me build my analytical skills to a different level which I think is expected in the actual BI industry.

Very good course , with very explanatory and additional material. Deep diving with exercises and especially the last assignment where total understanding was required in order to fulfil it.

I could not quite decide on the rating for this course but in the end I would rate it four stars. Overall, it provided a good introduction to BI. The content is covered on a high level but has the essentials to get you started. Unfortuntately, the lecturer was a bit hard to understand at times. The supplementary notes were very helpful.

Parts of this course were contrasting with other popular BI books. But that's what happens with blurry concepts such as BI. I liked the assignments although sometimes the instructions were a little unclear and you have to wait quite some time for your reviews and you have to wait for assignments that you can review. Overall, I recommend this course for getting started with BI.

I have only given this course 3 stars because the course content is very good, and it has helped me improve my business intelligence skills. However, it saddens my heart to see that appropriate measures have not been put in place to address students who have been flagged for plagiarized work. Yes, I notice the recent development of appending our e-signature before submitting an assignment. I really hope this would be effective in reducing plagiarism.

I have flagged several students in this course who submitted my assignments from week 2 to week 5 word for word. In fact, one of them forgot to remove my name.

To learners who work hard to do their assignments, don't be discouraged when you see your work plagiarized by another learner. Always remember that your goal is to improve your skills because this is what kept me going in completing this course.

All the best!

this course is great in concept. but the reality was disappointing and will have to improve. the professor gave lots of links to interesting external materials. but his prepared lectures were much briefer and consisted mostly of presenting bullet-point lists. as a result, i found myself studying just to pass the quizes and not to actually enhance my knowledge. :( given the high standard of the other courses in this specialization, i'm sure it will be better next time....

This course contains many references to external materials. For answers to some questions in quiz it is necessary to study external materials. I do not have time for this. In my opinion, all the information for the quiz must be contained in the attached presentation.

Too much talk....would have liked to see real-live examples.

A lot of the lecture material is unclear and does not fit with the content I've learned from other BI books, lectures, and experience. Additionally, the quizzes don't seem to test for real-world BI knowledge, rather they test for the ability to interpret the instructors fairly unique views on some BI topics. Furthermore, the additional readings need to be culled significantly, it looks like someone just googled BI topics and then copy and pasted the links they found. Please prioritize the additional readings highest value to lowest value and then post only the 4 to 7 reading that rank the highest. A pairwise comparison process may be useful when doing this.

Very slow course, there are significant redundancies. The resource links are often obsolete, and there's a really high number of errors on slides - the kinds that would really mess up somebody's career, if they worked in BI.

Basically just a product demo and the lecturer was very hard to comprehend.

This course was by far the most unnecessarily complicated certification program I’ve taken on Coursera. The content itself (Business Intelligence concepts, DSS, decision-making frameworks) is valuable, but the delivery is completely impractical for learners. Instead of focusing on core BI concepts and hands-on skills with modern tools like Tableau, Power BI, or SQL, the instructor forces students through outdated and overly technical exercises (installing Oracle VM, MicroStrategy workstation, renaming .zip files, etc.) that add no real learning value — especially for professionals aiming to use BI in real-world roles. The grading structure is also misleading: endless assignments, self-reflections, and peer-reviewed busywork worth only 1%, while major deliverables are bogged down by technical barriers that don’t even align with the skills hiring managers want today. I finished Module 1, and while I value the effort, I would not recommend this course to anyone who wants efficiency, clarity, and practical BI skills. In its current form, it risks discouraging learners who are otherwise motivated to pursue BI. I strongly urge the course designers to: Eliminate outdated Oracle VM/MicroStrategy dependencies. Focus on modern BI platforms (Tableau, Power BI, SQL, Cognos). Streamline grading so learners spend time practicing BI skills, not fighting setup issues. Respect learners’ time with concise, relevant assignments. Until then, I recommend the IBM Business Intelligence Analyst Professional Certificate instead, which is far more practical and aligned with industry demand.

It is a really good and well structured course. Initially, I felt the structure is not making me think but when I reached the end, in summative project, I realized how much I have learned. Anyone with basic IT background would be comfortable with the course. Learned various concepts of Business Intelligence; and microstrategy as a BI tool is good for analyzing. After I am done, I am going to spend more time looking at other tools of Microstrategy and apply those in the capstone course if required. I came across some students facing issues with microstrategy in the Discussion forum but I think improper installation or hardware and software support could be the cause.

Thank You, Mr. Karimi.

“Enjoyable training indeed!” “Enjoyable and constructive course, relevant to establishing better and more efficient team building within my workplace in the future.” “Inspired ideas on how to improve day to day working.” “Excellent training session and a very worthwhile day with variety and good pace