5.0
Reviewed Sep 29, 2022Excellent in depth teaching methodology. I learned how to apply python programming skills from the first course in the series to data anaysis!
The course moves really fast. You get a bunch of videos that are less than a minute long, with a few 2 minute ones in there. You can blow through all of the video content in a module in a few minutes. Then you get a quiz which is only difficult because you've only had ~4-5 minutes of time spent with the material (unless you watched the videos several times). But you'll pass the quiz without too much difficulty because you can either rewatch videos to get the answers or just retake it until you pass. I don't find that experience to be that useful.
The programming assignments are frustrating because they are harder than any of the examples given and require you to know the material well enough to apply it to something else. That's quite difficult because you have to use information that got less than a minute of attention in the course. If you ever had a horrible experience in a math classroom because a teacher did one easy example on the board and then expected you to do far harder problems on the exam without really explaining how or why any of it works, you may find this course to feel like that. I don't personally like this format for learning. I also found the directions to be ambiguous in a few cases.
The assignments also seem to be a bit buggy. Putting aside the usual issues with Jupyter Notebooks that people run into (not running cells in the correct order, etc.), I find that I had tremendous difficulty with a few of the assignments and those issues were not with my code. I would run the cells and have my answers get rejected. After an hour of pulling out hair wondering how I was wrong, I'd walk away. A few hours later, I'd open up the notebook again, run the EXACT same code, and the answers would be accepted. There is nothing more annoying than having a correct answer get rejected and wasting hours wondering why it was wrong. This doesn't seem to be an isolated experience--there are tons of people in the discussion forums posting about how their answers weren't accepted and they don't understand why, with the course staff replying that the answers were accepted.
I don't want to be unfairly negative. The production quality is good and the staff are reponsive in the forums. I just think the course is weirdly hard for an introduction. It's one of those introductory courses that sort of only works well if you already know the material already. But then, why take the introductory course? The course would be a lot better if they spaced it out and went slower. I think the videos need to be longer with more examples. That would allow people who don't "just get it" to not feel overwhelmed with the large amount of information while also allowing experienced people to just skip over that stuff if they don't need it.