Disappointing. Very disappointing. Here is why:

1. This comes as course 3 in a specialisation of 5. I'd expect to find here more advanced contents than in the previous 2. Instead, it goes in the opposite direction, i.e. concepts are more superficial than in previous courses. I expect a Specialisation to dive deeper as one moves on, instead with this course it looks likes it’s just going horizontally.

2. The course title reads “Visual Analytics with Tableau”, but actually in most cases it reduces to a series of suggestions / best practices on how to use basic components of Tableau, not on how to do Visual Analytics. It did touch on something related to visual analytics though, e.g. table calculations, but it didn’t go any farther than just giving a definition, and provide a small example.

3. The course duration is incredibly short. The contents delivered with this course could stay in one module only, in terms of quantity.

4. Space for practice is virtually absent, despite the speaker continuously repeats that practicing is important. There are vague suggestions on doing practice, but no clear tasks or exercises. Why did you remove the optional questions of previous courses? Furthermore, previous courses provide many resources, e.g. blogs to read, vizzes to analyse, … Why did you remove this as well?

5. The technical quality is disappointing too, and does not stand to the high level of the previous courses. There are clear signs of multiple editing. The transcription is not always appropriate. Intros and conclusions are often repeated twice!

As an initial course, and if it didn’t have the technical issues, it would have been a nice and fair course. But in the middle of a Specialisation, it’s a disaster.

This series is facilitated by a different Instructor, who is quite knowledgeable, but is not a qualified teacher, and the quality control is completely absent. In summary, the instructor is more demo'ing Tableau than TEACHING it (very different methods/approach). Some examples:

Instructor word for word repeats himself on SEVERAL occasions (as in, reads a line from the script, then reads the same line again). This is particularly noticeable in Course 3, Week 3, where every lecture he does this. The Filtering lecture he repeats himself verbatim 3 times within a one minute span (check the transcripts).

During one of his lectures, the instructor is describing a particular chart (area chart), but the chart he's showing is a different one (line chart).

The assignments regularly ask students to do things that have not been taught, requiring outside research (i.e. google). The AGG(Profit Ratio) stands out as one of the more frustrating aspects, in both Week 1 and 4.

Some of the assignments have incomplete details on what is needed to finish (specifically compared to what's displayed in the supplementary image). Students have to go out to the forums to read what students from prior sessions have posted to figure out what is required (lack of quality control)

Throughout the series of courses, the same source data is used (Sales Superstore Dataset). On one of the assignments (Course 3, Week 2), it references the same dataset (by name), but the file contains different data elements. The assignment details do not tell students it's different information (with the same file name), and reading the forums, can be seen as a regular issue for students (for over 10 months). There's no reason for this NOT to be highlighted in the Assignment. Same for Week 4, while Profit Ratio is included in the dataset, it doesn't Agg(Profit Ratio), as displayed.

The lectures are less than half as long as prior lectures (by the primary instructor), as the instructor doesn't give nearly enough detail. For calculated fields, the instructor literally reads off a list of the available formulas (that a student could read on their own) and that's the entire lesson (same applies to several lectures). At most, he talks about one example, but rarely displays it on screen. This is what I mention above, demo'ing versus teaching, just showing that Tableau has a particular feature, not adequately teaching its possible/various uses. There are plenty of demo videos out there (offered by Tableau), learners taking these courses are looking for more than that.

Some of the quizzes have questions about details not covered in the lectures. Most of the time you can extrapolate, but it's guessing rather than having been taught specific information.

Almost every lecture video starts with a recap of the prior video and ends with a foreshadowing of what's next. On 3 minute videos, there's no need to spend over a minute on that; most students are likely going from one to the next in quick succession.

Instead of saying things like "try and explore on your own", offer optional practice assignments or specific configurations to try. As a learner, I want to practice these things, to figure out various options and functionality, guidance on variations are much more helpful than content-less prompt to explore on our own.

I have mixed feelings about the example visual being provided with the assignments. Without them, I likely would not have been able to produce anything compared to what is being asked. With them, I found myself just looking at it and copying the layout/configurations to make sure I got it right. I didn't feel the lectures adequately prepared me for most of the assignments (without the finished product in front of me).

The videos for this course seemed to be 30% recap of the prior lesson, and 20% restatement of what was learned. Some even duplicated their own content in the restatement. The material covered was simply running through each of the menus in Tableau. Again, this material may be of use, but would be better as a primer for the class rather than presented as useful, paid content. Terribly disappointed.

This course is at best OK. Only covers the bare minimum. But what is very frustrating is that the assignment instructions are very poorly worded. It is confusing and the expectations are not clearly led out. This results in the students have to interpret what the author wants. Overall this left a very bad taste. It does not meet Coursera standard or what is the standard in other courses.

Assignment exercises have missing instructions and even after so many threads about it, no actions have been taken by instructors. Moreover, less emphasis is on teaching practical applications of the tableau. Overall I think it's a very basic course with bad assignments.

I was probably closer to a 3.5. I think this course was the weakest out the three I've taken so far in the UC-Davis Tableau specialization. There just wasn't a lot of material taught. The video lectures are incredibly short (2-3 minutes) and the final 30 seconds of each is spent with an overly repetitive recap of what's been learned so far. When you only give instruction for 1-2 minutes, it seems unnecessary to have the recap. In terms of the content presented, I expected more in-depth examples and explanations. If you are teaching calculated fields, spend some time going over the syntax and provide multiple examples. Show us what happens to the output if you alter segments of the syntax. Overall, I'm finding this Tableau specialization spends too much time on visualization theory and not enough time on actual Tableau buttonology. I want to learn the "ins and outs" of the software, so I can make it do what I want it to do. I feel many of the Free tutorials on the Tableau website provide better instruction on the actual mechanics. On top of that, too many of the exercises are fraught with unclear directions, inconsistent data files (why do the superstore datasets keep changing?), and in several instances, students are asked to perform a task that doesn't get introduced until a later chapter. It makes everything seem hastily put together. Many of the discussion forums have pointed out these problems, but seeing as none of have been fixed and students are still writing about the same issues 3 years after first pointing them out, I'd say there is no active participation from the course creators or lecturers. I'm learning, but if your goal is to learn the software, there are better, cheaper options.

The content is essentially a subset of the information available in the free tutorials on Tableau's website. And a pretty small subset with that; the total length of the course is less than most of the MOOCs I have taken have for one week.

Through this course learner can efficiently learn about dual layer maps, dual axis, creating calculated fields and many more. Thanks for such a great platform to learn and for great instructors.

I enjoyed the hands-on aspect of this course. I learned more about using Tableau from it that the prior courses in the specialization. I give this 3 of 5 stars for 3 reasons:

1) My classmates and I think that the instructor left one video out the course which is necessary to answer one of the quiz questions.

2) The instructions for at least 2 of the peer-graded assignments are incomplete. The grading criteria requires features that aren't mentioned in the instructions. As a result you need to alter and resubmit the assignments in order to meet all the grading criteria.

3) The instructor repeats himself in the course videos. He's present a summary of the video while displaying a Tableau screenshot and then repeat the same summary while displaying a Presentation slide. I feel that more time should have been spent reviewing the Tableau features and eliminate the repetition of the material.

The first two courses in the specialization were all theory and hardly included any hands-on Tableau instruction. So I was really looking forward to this third course to get some practical experience with Tableau. But after all that theory in courses one and two this was a disappointingly quick and cursory look at Tableau. I was expecting something like this from course 1 with each subsequent course getting deeper into Tableau functionality. The theory is important, but if this is supposed to be a Tableau specialization then the balance needs to be reversed - 80% practical Tableau instruction and 20% theory rather than the other way around!

This is one of those courses where I didn't get much more out of it than if I had done it on my own. It's helpful for showing the capabilities of Tableau, but not for explaining them. The instructor merely reads what is already in the Tableau menu vs. explaining it--not terribly helpful. The practice is also not very helpful because you don't learn why you're doing certain things. It's easy to just check the boxes, but not to understand what you're doing and why. This course was not one of the better ones.

This course is not well designed, there are multiple mistakes in the videos, assignments, etc. The content is covered after you already had to apply it in an assignment in a previous lesson. The tests are also not well made. The instructions to peer-reviewed assignments are not clear and will not bring you to the correct result which is shown during peer review. No involvement from the faculty, no one to answer questions.

Great course and content. Got enough practice on peer assignments. Really like charting guidelines. Highly recommend this course to get your data visualization to the next level.

The course was well organized and easy to follow. It provided good examples. However, I felt that I could have learned more, there was only few video material every week and in the beginning a lot of time was used to explain conceptual things like which chart to use when. I think, probably for some users this is very helpful, but I would have wished to learn more techniques and skills in tableau, maybe

This course is just a very basic walk-thru of the Tableau interface. At some points in the lecture videos the instructor literally clicks on menus in Tableau and just starts reading all the options. It should probably just be combined with the 1st course in the program. The peer reviewed assignments are the best part of the class. They are good opportunities to work through examples in Tableau, but they are set up with instructions to essentially recreate an existing visualization - kind of a paint by numbers approach to learning.

Was expecting to learn much more in this course. Quite disappointed as the video content was so bad that instructor was simply repeating and reading out the same words. There should be more demonstration on table calculations and formula, in the end each video is just 2-3 mins

The assignments are inconsistent with the videos. Videos are barely informative and there should be opportunity for practice before proceeding to the assignment.

Tests material it did not teach. Has assignments that require knowledge of business and sales.

Simply reading not explaining

"Visual Analytics with Tableau" is a thoughtfully structured and highly engaging course that deepens your understanding of how to uncover insights through effective data visualization. The content strikes a perfect balance between theory and hands-on application, guiding learners through key concepts like trend analysis, clustering, forecasting, and dashboard interactivity. The real strength of this course lies in how it emphasizes storytelling with data—making complex patterns not just visible but meaningful. The step-by-step demonstrations in Tableau are clear and practical, enabling learners to build confidence as they progress. Whether you're a beginner or someone looking to sharpen your skills, this course is incredibly useful and rewarding. By the end, you not only improve your technical capabilities in Tableau but also gain a stronger sense of how to approach data analysis with clarity and purpose. Highly recommended for anyone serious about visual analytics or pursuing a career in data visualization!