Nice

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+: I reached my goal for the course and now I understand a bit about R. I succeeded to pass within much shorter time than anticipated course duration. The course certificate is posted to my Linkedin profile.

-: No human mentors on the course discussion forum - all questions answered by other students. Automatic tests in swirl are too restrictive and do not accept perfectly correct student solutions slightly different to those anticipated by the authors. Week 2 assignment is much different from the reading material. Nothing taught about charting in R.

Overall comment: I think it is good value for money.

All in all good stuff. A couple of comments:

Swirl grading should be a little more flexible; sure cut is more succinct that nested ifelse's, but there's more than one way to skin the data-analytic cat in R, as I'm sure y'all are aware.

Also, I recommend more emphasis on data tables. I use them exclusively due to the dramatic performance improvement over data frames. And in my brief experiments, dplyr and tidyr commands worked on them too.

This first course was review for me. Nonetheless I definitely learned a few practical things that will up my data science game (which can always use upping).

There are a few areas of the course that are not fully explained and cause extra time trying to 'figure it out'. I am not referring to code/learning, but the logistics of the class. However, there are a few questions in assignments & quizzes that refer to things that were not particularly explained either in the lecture or in the book. I understand self study is beneficial, but I start the course with the understanding that questions will be based off of lecture or the book. If additional resources are needed, then that should be expressly stated in the lecture or book.

This course has a perfect combination of theory and hands-on exercises. I've been doing a few courses in Data Science on Coursera and I have found this method the best at least for me personally. I will probably carry on doing these courses. On the negative side, the student forum is practically dead, don't count on getting any help there. Coursera support have been very difficult and I had to wait a while to get my certificate. In the meantime Coursera charged me for an extra month (after I'd completed the course).

Une initiation intéressante et complète à R qui a l'avantage de donner des bons réflexes pour coder rapidement. Le caractère interactif des exercices de programmation est un gros plus. Attention : il n'y a pas de vidéos hormis la vidéo d'introduction. On peut aussi avoir des difficultés de syntaxe susceptibles de nous bloquer un bout de temps, notamment sur des fonctions où la documentation est un peu aride (je pense à cut et à spread sur lesquelles j'ai bien passé 1/4 du temps que j'ai consacré au total à ce MOOC).

I found this course quite interesting because sometimes we learn about modeling techniques, but we forget one of the most important things: how to write a good script by applying useful packages or functions to read and manage datasets. It has been an easy course and I recommend it to people who want to start basic reading and managing data with R-project. In addition, the possibility of deciding your own work schedule is very helpful when you have to do other stuff from the university.

Excelent course to start with the basics of R language. It gives a modern introduction to R programming avoiding traditional topics like loops and conditionals keeping them for more advanced programming topics. It also covers almost all tidyverse packages with a shallow introduction to the most common packages.

I have acomplaint. The dataset for the final quiz was outdated, I managed to pass the quiz guessing variable names.

The course book is good and a nice resource. Swirl lessons were also really nice. They are interactive and helped becoming familiar with the functions. However, video tutorials on real datasets like the one from week 4 would be helpful. Also, the final quiz was disproportionally difficult in comparison to what was taught during the weeks leading up to week 4. Overall a good course that provides a solid introduction to R.

The exercises and examples led to a better understanding than many course I've taken. The swirl interactive sessions helped to understand it well. It is sometimes frustrating to get the right answer, but but do it in the wrong way and not have it count. Also there is the issue of having old versions of tidyverse in course (e.g., gather vs pivot_longer), but it would be pretty hard to keep the course constantly updated.

Some frustrating issues with Swirl functionality, but the discussion boards are helpful for troubleshooting fixes. Seems to cover the majority of the basics I previously learned in the R section of an in-person, for-credit Quantitative Methods of Management course I took at my college, plus it included a few additional useful topics. I appreciate that it provides links for additional learning. All around solid course.

Very informative, however could be more complete. Some functions aren't introduced and the swirl package didn't accept other solutions path that would likewise lead to the same result. I believe also that some update would not harm. However, this course is really informative and, in my opinion, one of the best available. I really enjoy this course. Nice job and thank you very for sharing this knowledge.

The swirl assignments are fairly good but not that engaging. If you don't mind doing only readings and swirl assignments, this is a good course to take. If you really want video lectures, you'll want to look elsewhere (there are essentially none). The final assignment was pretty good for making you look things on your own in order to get the solutions, while also not being unreasonably difficult.

You are very much on your own as far as figuring out methods and steps. Expect to use the forums a lot. The professor does a great job explaining but there's a gap between the lecture and the assignment. I compare it to not knowing what a circle is and then being asked to draw one just based on someone's explanation. You'd get better results if you were at least shown a curved line.

I really liked the format of the Quiz for Week 4 - there is a dataset given and questions requiring you to do your own data manipulation/calculation to come to an answer (as opposed to the other weeks requiring swirl lessons, which weren't as fun/challenging). I would've liked to see more of the Week 4 type quizzes earlier. Overall, though, this is a good foundation course.

Swirl should be accepting of other answers as well as different snippets of code will produce the same result.

At times this got frustrating and my reason of taking time to complete the course is because I'd leave things in between because of swirl issues.

This goes away and it is a 5-star as a beginner course; it is made beautifully to get us up to speed

This course is very informative and practical special the last assignment because I saw the real data and use of some of packages and functions which I only read them so far and I didn't know how to use them. I didn't give five stars only because problem which I have with swirl during the course:)

I wish there had been more exercises like the final Week 4 quiz along the way -- Swirl was useful as an interactive supplement to the readings, but those last 10 questions were the only time where I really felt challenged to use learnings to solve problems more independently and originally.

Recorded whiteboard classes or videos from the instructors would significantly increase the value of the course. There should be more interaction with the instructors. Some weeks tasks/assignments were extremely more difficult compared to others. Otherwise, I liked it and learned a lot.

A very unique approach to teaching a programming language. This course removed my fear of learning a programming language. I have become comfortable in running Rstudio, and understand the codes. Various excel operations I feel comfortable doing with R. Thanks for the course Dr. Peng.

The course is great, and very challenging. It is a little frustrating that the course requires 1 out of 2 programming assignments to be completed, but shows you as past due despite reaching that goal...

Getting this corrected and verified by Coursera has also been difficult.

Bastante buen curso, cubre gran cantidad de las funciones y paquetes existentes. El problema fue el examen. En ocasiones no se especificaba bien lo requerido y basicamente fue como te enseñamos a batir un huevo, haz esta tarta de merengue. Aun asi, bastante bien.

The material gets progressively tougher but I never felt totally overwhelmed. My only feedback is for the mentors to be more responsive in the forums - if we're posting it means we've already thrown everything at the question and still couldn't figure it out.

It's a great course for those who are just starting to learn R, It provides enriching for data analysis, however as a constructive feedback, I feel there could be improvements around how the exercise are planned and the submission process for the exercises