This course uses a software package developed by the instructors for a portion of the required tests. There are serious bugs in this package that make it impossible for students to complete the tasks assigned. Going through the discussion boards, these flaws have been present for at least 2 years -- clearly Johns Hopkins in general, and the instructors in particular, hold the students' time and learning experience in such low regard it borders on contempt.

This course should be removed for two reasons:

1. The only videos are the introduction videos. Everything else is a text-based assignment. This is just lazy. If I wanted to google how commands worked, I can do that without paying for Coursera. There is no instructional material contained in this course.

2. The student is required to submit assignments through a third-party interface that doesn't work. Completed assignments are not given credit. There are many people in the discussion forums saying the same thing.

Swirl doesn't allow some codes even if its correct. '=' is not allowed for example.

Not possible to submit programming assignments, this course seems to have a lot of technical issues. Signing out during the first week and un-enrolling the specialization. I'll check again later to see if those technical problems are solved.

The content is good, but many students (including me) are NOT able to submit assignments with the course "token". I've commented in the course discussion forum about this, and I have opened a support ticket with Coursera, but no one is taking serious initiative to correct the malfunction.

this course basically just has you run through the widely available SWIRL packages and then gives you a quiz it has poorly prepared you for and charges you for the privilege.

This course, and the Specialization as a whole, is poorly structured and a rather cursory overview that is unlikely to satisfy serious learners. If the material is completely new to you then it will likely leave you confused as it does not adequately explain the concepts. If you are already somewhat familiar and are looking for deeper dive into R and programming you will be disappointed as the courses just don't have the depth of material needed to gain mastery over the subject.

Your money and time would probably be better spent on a couple of books by Wickham.

When a number of students ran into an identical problem with an assignment, there were no support or help, for weeks. By the end, we never got any support. A work-around the glitch was found by a student. For a paid course that is not optimal.

There was no mentor to help.

Not at all engaging. Its like a university lecturers notes without any personal interaction or videos.

If I wanted to read a book, I would have bought the book.

There are also many "right" ways to code, and the swirl tutorial, while helpful for learning specific syntax, should not grade correct answers as wrong simply because they use a different syntax. It is overly rigid.

Great gap between teaching and what is required to pass the course. Unnecessarily difficult.

The didactic material is not compelling.

Not recommended.

The course dumps a ginormous amount of content onto learners while being extremely poorly structured. The course materials are littered with spelling and formatting errors. There are assignment segments in the course that require R functions that were not covered in the syllabus. Multiple datasets required for stepping through the course materials as well as required assignments were at best not provided by mistake or neglect (datasets.zip file only contains the "Team Standings" data), or at worst provided only with the purchase of the textbook + dataset on top of the Coursera subscription fee. Some of these issues could potentially have been solved by having more responsive instructors in the forum, but they were nowhere to be seen, and there are questions with datasets or swirl token that date back years without replies. Overall, I highly recommend spending your money somewhere else. Perhaps downloading swirl alone with all its free materials without going through this course is a good start.

The teaching is very practical. Apprciate

Very Very Rigorous Course for a beginner on R language and because of its nature, after completing just one course, I feel like I have gained a lot of knowledge and also familiarity with R language.

very good course. I love it.

Solid introduction to R and the tidyverse with very nice assignments to get practice on the command line.

Very practical course with plenty of practices to get you started data handling in R. Course focus on Tidyverse series of packages which come in handy when dealt with data manipulation. Little is talked about on in-built functions of R and use of functions is not covered.

The course is helpful for the R beginners. Learned a lot during the course, and the final week homework led me to review the past 3 weeks' lessons in a practical way. I recommand.

Excelent course!

Loved this course! Beware that the material is at an intermediate level, and not really appropriate for beginner R programmers. The final quiz was extremely challenging, as it should be, and very useful.

I give this course six stars and take one away for the automated upload of answers from R (the swirl package). This package /process is really buggy and causes needless grief especially in Lesson 2.

The content of this course is A+++

The course was well designed for beginners. It helped me to gain lot of confidence in building my knowledge

Neat and easy to read introduction!

Brilliant course to get the basics of data wrangling

Very good course. The pedagogy and the course content along with the assignments is rigorous and fantastic.