Ratings and Reviews for Introduction to Data Science in Python

Really challenging and interesting

A lot of interesting, mind-changing ideas and approaches to processing data. Very suitable for beginners in Python

Excellent course! Christopher is an amazing professor!

Very tough question asked without proper teaching. Course should be made learning oriented.

The course was undoubtedly challenging (which in itself is a good thing), but at times it was more challenging than it had to be because of some little errors, inconsistecies, wording in the assignment, etc. Sometimes some files wouldn't be where they were supposed to be. Sometimes it took me more time to actually understand what I was supposed to do than actually doing it, because it wasn't really clear what was required. Ok, English is not my first language but I am quite good. Besides, lots of other students complained about confusing wording, so it's not just me. Sometimes some instructions were missing and you'd only realise that after digging through the discussion forums for hours. So, basically there were a few things that made the whole experience more difficult than it had to be, and they weren't about knowledge or skils but about the course "infrastructure". Before I started this course I'd already taken a few courses on Python programming (on a different platform), including numpy and pandas, but the assinments in this course were still qute difficult for me. You have to do a lot of searching online to get to the solution. In general, I'm all for the idea of having to do more self-learning but the online format is already more challenging than face-to-face learning, so I think it would help to have a few guided exercises between the lectures to understand the material better. Maybe if I had more experience with Python and programming, it would be easier. One thing that disappointed me was that they recommended a book (optional reading), but you would have to purchase it. Now, if we were studying on campus then we would have access to the university library where we could borrow this book (probably), but as online students we don't have that option. I understand that they can't just upload copywrited books for anyone to access but maybe they could come up with a system that would allow students to somehow access the books temporarily, or make just a few necessary chapters available. I think that's for Coursera to manage, not for the University of Michigan though, because the university can only take advantage of whatever technology coursera can offer (at least that's my understanding). On a positive note, the discussion forums were quite helpful, and the teaching staff were quick to answer most of the time. I suggest, if you take this course, then take full advantage of the discussion forums. I also liked that there were two types of assignments (multiple choice quiz and programming). I think that's a great idea. So, overall, if they made a few improvements to the course, it would be a great one.

Excellent class. I went from being a novice python user to actually being comfortable using it.

Excellent Course, I struggled with the assignments a bit but after doing some extra research I managed to complete them and learned a lot in the process. Great Course to get started in Data Science using Python!

learn lot of stuff related to python and different libraries.

Great course! You will learn using the Numpy and Pandas libraries, together with the Python Regular Expressions (Regex). The third and fourth assignments are challenging and put you in front of (relatively) complex real databases (which is great) and go also beyond the material discussed in the course, but this pushes you to search on Stack Overflow and read the libraries' documentation, which is a great way to learn. I would definitely recommend the course!

Was not a fan of this course at all. The first assignment is completely on regex which I understand that it is an important topic, but that's a fairly advanced topic in data science so to have as the first assignment of the first course in this specialization seems a little ridiculous. Not a single question on the assignment was on numpy which we spent the vast majority of the week learning. I did not get much out of the other assignments either. Dr. Brooks is really not the best teacher. Very knowledgeable, but not good at relaying that knowledge to others in a clear manner. If I could go back a month I wouldn't have taken this course.