The assignments were unclear (random programming exercises with no comments or indication as to what the components are actually supposed to accomplish) and had little to do with the assigned readings. Didn't feel like a college level course let alone a graduate level course, but it also didn't feel like it would be useful for someone just looking to learn about software architecture for big data.

The course content and the assignments felt like they were not related at all at times. It felt like the instructor deliberately avoided making video lectures for concepts that would be a degree more complicated to understand and just threw in links to external articles and research papers - without any kind of overview of the concepts whatsoever.

Terrible. I am not a beginner. Put aside the lack of support from TAs/Instructors, put aside the unclear and disorganized assignment criteria. The code supplied for testing in the 3rd assignment straight up is missing dependencies, rendering the assignment completely unworkable. This is a terrible introduction to the master's degree at Univ at Colorado Boulder. I'm only glad I took this specialization path first instead of the other, so I didn't waste any money paying for credit. It's too bad. I really want to find a good online master's program where the professors/TAs are engaged and the assignments are relevant, albeit challenging, and workable! BROKEN ASSIGMENTS MUST BE FIXED!

1. They need a bit more improved instructions.

2. The monitors do not monitor the forums at all so if students are not helping others then there is NO help for your questions.

3. They completely rely upon students grading other students (there is no auto-grader e.g. like Univ Calif Sand Diego does).

4. There is "make-the tests pass" grades, but students are able to make one of the tests pass w/o actually doing it the correct way so the tests don't have sufficient efficacy. (The Milk Problem - a few students just copied the update method logic to the decrementBy logic which should not pass).

5. The course does not allow me to attach the certificate to my LinkedIn profile. Instead it asks me for my government issued ID as if I'm taking the course for college credit (I'm not).

Maybe i had the wrong expectations. I enrolled expecting a somewhat traditional class content delivery. But it seems like the course is pretty superficial, and quite random? Like, why am I learning about bitcoin in this class? how does that add to my knowledge and understanding of big data systems? I don't get it. Why are we reading and answering quizzes on accidental vs essential? I didn't quite see the value proposition, I guess.

Typically, you will have a short lecture which does not help the assignment at all. Even more, the guide for the assignment is vague. Collectively, if you know how to complete the coding assignment, you don't need to learn this course; if you have no idea about the assignment, you cannot learn anything useful from the lecture. Extremely frustrating about the design of the course.

As other reviewers have described, there are many more prerequisites required than stated on the course page. If you do not have experience with Java you will be very lost on what to do. Unenrolled immediately

I think the material is good, but I would like to have more ways to interact with classmates, course coordinators, and instructors that are not asynchronous.

For example, a discord or slack group to talk about the class, video calls (i.e. zoom) for office hours, etc.

Make sure you have a basic to intermediate understanding of Java to complete the Assignments. The instructions can be vague and implied given the experience you're supposed to already have with Java.

Does not go very deep and some exercises doen't really seem to work software architecture concepts, but merely simple coding problems or completions.

This course is a joke and barely treads above the line of "its a waste of time"

I found the video lectures to be uneven in quality. Some of them were good, but many felt cursory and disconnected from the assignments. Some of the slides used in the lectures were also low-effort (i.e. words repeated by the lecturer instead of diagrams or something that added to the presentation). I agree with another reviewer that the course themes seemed random, but I did find the topics and external reading materials to be interesting and useful, particularly around the CAP theorem and its practical applications. As someone who has professional experience in several languages but not Java, I did spend a lot of time independently learning Java and its ecosystem (this is not a knock on the course, more of a F.Y.I). However, I do think the coding assignments could have had clearer instructions. I also noticed that there were unanswered questions on discussion forums from over a month ago from students asking for help, so don't expect any assistance from the course facilitators.

It is expected that you already have in-depth knowledge of Java and Kotlin. During the exercises, the biggest challenges of the course are setting up and configuring the environment and not the topics actually discussed in the course. There is hardly any help with the setup, the only description is for Mac systems, Windows users are on their own. In general, I have to say that when I pay 500$+ (for-credit version) for a course, I expect much better learning material and better exercises.

Solid advanced-level course for software architects looking to broaden horizons. The course is challange-based and requires experience with Object Oriented Programming, plus basic experience in Java.

The course is optimized for MacOS. If you are using any other OS expect headaches. The theoretical part is nice and clean, practical will require one to remember/understand a lot of Java syntax without any reflexion of theoretical concepts.

Thank you for such an intelligently thought out online cadence to projects and learning material. I found it to be a wonderful start to the pathway to enter MS-CS degree track and appreciated the way that I could learn alongside the exercises by spending time in the code examples and structure of how the assignments worked.

I'd like the lecture notes to be well-organized, even outside of the lecture itself.

Requires Java programming

Impressive content

good experience