This course continues building on the foundation introduced in the first course in the specialization, providing a good quantity of new information using the same easy-to-follow format. One of the exercises in this class involves going through a tutorial provided by ESRI and, while it's very informative, the comparison makes it clear that the instructions with screenshots for exercises created by the instructor are easier to understand and follow. The instructor clearly put a lot of thought and effort into the content and structure of the class and materials. While the course focuses on ArcGIS specifically, many of the concepts demonstrated can be applied regardless of which computer application is used.

A very good course to take if you are unfamiliar with GIS and ArcMap. It just scratches the surface of ArcMap, but it gives you a good base (or working knowledge). I feel more confident using ArcMap now, and ready to learn more about it.

The training is well thought out, but is fast-paced. I recommend that you pay close attention in the lectures, and do all the exercises, even the "extra practice" ones because the final project will use a lot of what was presented.

Speaking of these "extra practice" exercises, they are located in a companion book that you can buy, but the book is not required for the course. I recommend getting it because it is nice to be able to pick it up and reference it if there is a topic you don't quite understand. You can find used copies on Amazon.

This isn't a negative, but I think that the estimate of 3 to 5 hrs/week is optimistic. Plan on double that if you're like me and not a gifted learner, and are taking notes.

Good course, well structured to deliver the invaluable skills, ranging from data management to final output after processing. Good exposure to the toolbox, expecting more in the next course.

This portion has very no graded projects and zero printable workflows that help you to understand what is going on so you can put the instruction into practice. It's pretty much "Here's all the important tools you're going to need to use. Just play with them and hope against hope you learned to use them."

Instructor and/or Moderator help is again nonexistent.

I will continue in the hopes of finishing this entire course pack but I will know in the future that anyone else with a Coursera Certificate in this field will also most likely not have any practical knowledge to do much with and of the tools presented in this section of the course.

Material really needs updating

Very informative course. Some concepts are not easy to understand at the first glance, but it is always interesting to learn and apply in the projects. The final assignment made me frustrated in the beginning. But as soon as getting the whole and clear picture of the project, it was fun to apply the knowledge into the real project, and designed our own workflow. The videos explained explicitly some core concepts which were very helpful and I found myself revisiting many times again when doing the project. Forum was helpful as well. I learned and got clarified some problems there many times. Overall it was a great course for anyone who wants to dig into GIS more!

Great course designed by collaboration by UC Davis and coursera. This course explains difficult tools and methodology with clarity that you can master it by first understanding it and followed by practicing the given reading material for the each points that are covered. Great Job by Nick Santos Sir. Thank you.

This is a really nice course that lets to go deeper into GIS concepts, at this point one can feel power on the fingertips - ability to create and publish own online maps can not be underestimated!

Nick, you and your team did good job on making the course enjoyable, only problem I faced was having trouble downloading the tutorial 2 assignment data. Still it was a very good experience!!!

Needs to be more clear and easier to use. Some of my downloaded files that were supposed to pair up with the lecture didn't have all the required layers. My final assignment was graded incorrectly I believe but there's no way to see feedback or the grading done by the peer reviewer. And there's always some small problems with the assignments or the lectures that would probably go unnoticed with someone familiar with the program but when you get an error while your learning, you can spend an hour or more trying to figure out what went wrong. There needs to be some immediate help message system or something because trying to get a hold of someone running the course is impossible.

Overall these courses were interesting. I do feel like I learned a bit and am more comfortable using ArcGIS. I will say though that I was not super impressed with the structure of this specialization. I felt that many times the instructor would skim over topics and not really clarify or provide context. I would then have to answer quiz questions related to those. I also was not impressed with structure of the assignments and all the grammatical errors. Finally, I had a hard time following one of the instructors. They seemed uncomfortable and didn't really explain things well.

Nick Santos is fantastic and I learned a lot in this course. However, my qualms are with coursera and the structure of the peer review assignment. I think I deserved full points on the final project (one reviewer did in fact award me full points) but the other reviewer graded harshly and plainly graded wrong, without any reason as to why they marked me down. Their comment was "good". Its like they did not even look at my project. There needs to be better quality monitoring in the grading for this course because its very discouraging and frankly infuriating that this happened.

The quality of the voice in the videos are very low. Also, please produce the videos in 1080 quality, as in 720 format some of the texts and details are not readable in the videos. Thanks

Great course, I learned a lot and it was well structured. It went in to a lot of common and useful skills and theory required for entry level GIS work, and I felt that I learned a lot. The units were quite dense, but the main points for each lecture were explained well and at a good pace. The final assignment was a well balanced application of skills learned in the course, including geoprocessing workflows, digitizing, basic analysis and finally uploading a finished product into ArcGIS online, which was a suite that wasn't around when I last studied in University, so I felt it was handy to get an intro.

My only complaint is there was only one assignment that seemed to be a bit out of place, with content that was quite advanced without relevance to what had been discussed in the course.

Wonderful. I found this much more challenging than the first course, and to be honest, my enthusiasm for the course was not as strong as it was for course 1. But, that is normal for me with coursera classes. I'm proud to say this is the first Coursera specialization where I completed TWO of the classes. Normally, I would complete 1, and not finish the second. But I was very determined, and I managed to finish this one. Great job Nick. I love your teaching style, and the clarity of the instructions of your assignments is second to NONE on this website. Congratulations on a job well done.

I had taken the Fundamentals in GIS course and after completing that decided to continue with GIS Data Formats, Design and Quality. Being an Earth Scientist I have been exposed and have used GIS previously. I have also taken courses on foundation GIS courses. I have been very impressed with the level of the courses in this series. Dr. Santos is knowledgeable and the material is relevant, and interesting. I particularly enjoyed the exercises that allow me to practice the skill sets acquired during the lectures.

Very interesting and dynamic course where you get to learn and apply fundamental GIS concepts. It is high-paced but if you really enjoy navigating and working with datasets you'll never regret the material covered. The thorough presentation, case studies and practice material of basic but useful Rasters, feature classes and geo-processes was a plus, as well as the case study with Spatial analyst tool set. Thank you Nick! I'm so excited with the modules that come next to complete the Specialization!

The content of this course consists of learning more advanced skills to deliver a GIS analytical project, compared to the first course, notably learning how to use Spatial Analysis tools. I highly recommend it simply because the explanations are very clear, on-point and most importantly, beginner-friendly; the videos are nicely elaborated. I plan to finish the whole Specialization before attacking Python and R!

Another really good course on GIS. I followed on from the first in the specialisation and I think I would have been quite lost without doing that.

I like to follow the videos with the demo materials in an open version of ArcGIS - this can be quite hard as some of the demo materials are very big and my laptop struggles to keep up with big processing, a slight improvement could be to have smaller demo files.

Content is a logical progression from the Fundamentals course. Nick presents it in a clear and well-paced way, and the tutorials, quizzes and peer-graded assignment all reinforce retention effectively. I feel that completing the specialization will enable me to make a much broader contribution to the GIS-related projects I manage.