The coding part is easy to comprehend but the course does not offer much opportunity to practice and learn the coding. The assignments are straight forward and doable. Sometimes it is hard to read the code in the videos even at 720p as it appears blurred. The subtitles cover some of the formulae shown at the bottom of the video and there are many mistakes in subtitles.

Overall, it is a good introductory course that gives you an idea of about Apache Spark.

Good

The Course touches the important topics related to scalable data. The quizzes & assignments were challenging and the fun to solve.

Bad

Though the course touches the important topics, it does not go deep into it. Some of the codes provided in the video didn't work with the current version of python and spark. For example the code for finding the median. The Cognitive IOT app development method provided was broken and it wasn't the right way to do it.

I was really looking forward to this specialization but from the very first course I am really disappointed. The videos refer to various not updated information and then suddenly we are expected to do an assignment that was not at all explained in the course. I am not saying it is difficult, or not achievable but to be honest until now (week 2) it feels mostly like a waste of time.. Really sorry for this review.

The course should be updated. It's hard work, but it's worthy. I'm sure students get confused a lot with the inconsistencies generated by the update of IBM Watson. So, there is some minus difference nowadays with what's being taught. Anyways, I think the content of the course is perfect to start. I learned satisfactory tools and ideas about how to handle big data.

The idea and material behind the course is really interesting, albeit very basic. Some of the exercises and quizes, like the ones of interpreting plots are not very clear, since the plot quality is low. However, this is a very nice introduction to ML and IoT using Watson. Looking Forward for the next courses of the IBM Degree for advance data science

The course is called 'Fundamentals' and is indeed pretty basic. A good quick overview of the most basic concepts. Sometimes too basic to qualify for an Advanced course on Coursera. So, not really clear for which audience the course is.

Another fundamental course that does a better job is Spark Fundamentals from cognitiveclass.ai.

Very very basic. Far away from advance. I did more than the whole course in just one lecture at my university (LSE). And that lecture at the university did not assume that we already got experience with Spark or python. I still give three stars because it is still quite ok, just far away from advanced.

I felt that, for a course labelled as 'Advanced', there were too many trivial questions in the quizzes and too much hand-holding in the programming assignments. That being said I did enjoy the course and learned quite a lot and look forward to the next one in the specialisation.

The course was great, the material and the assignments.

IBM Watson platform was easy to use.

But I can't see how this course is included in the "advanced" data science specialization.

Honestly I was expecting a more advanced course. But we'll see with the next ones.

The content was OK, but I have expected more. Probably it was too basic for me. I would have been happy to see some more real life examples, like when to use the different statistics to solve real problems, not only the theoretical ones.

A detailed explanation on the trade off of different approaches that can be used in Big Data but there is not enough examples of manipulating big datasets

I believe that the assignments of this course should have been a bit more rigorous. Also, there should have a been a bit more focus on Apache Spark.

The course content is amazing but the instructor's accent is very difficult to understand and in some videos subtitles in English weren't available.

give lot of details about pyspark like basics.

its getting hectic with just the small details given in videos.

videos needs to be changed and updated

Topics can be taught a bit more slowly, it was a bit difficult for me to understand. Otherwise, the content covered was very helpful!

The functions we need to complete looks quite messy, it'a little bit overwhelming especially for people who start with spark.

I felt the course is out of date and have worked on these classes to update it so that I can run the video classes again

the assignment is required to be in sparkaql functions however the course is just using spark with built in functions

Too many legacy issues. Would be better to start a new course altogether and maintain same syntax,etc.

Analytically very simple, and fails to explain much of the syntax needed for the assignments.

The videos have not been updated to fix the errors (there is just a hint for a correct code)

Very basic lessons. Definitely what you would expect from an Advanced course.

Labs are pretty hard. Need to research immensely. Knowledge is great though.

The structure and material quality needs complete revision and improvement

More coding please. One doent learn much just by filling out couple words