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9

This is the final course in the IBM Data Science Certificate and it is primarily focused around a project of your choosing. First, you learn how to scrape data and use the Foursquare API, which is quite helpful as these skills are generally transferrable. Then you'll need to come up with an idea that is loosely related to location data in some way. You'll have several weeks to implement your idea and write a report and a blog post/presentation. The final project is a lot of work.

In my opinion, the grading system could be better. You rely on peer reviews to pass the course, but only one peer looks at your work. Multiple sets of eyes would be fairer and hopefully generate more feedback. The discussion forum aspect could also be improved to promote collaboration and not simply requests to "please review my submission".

All in all, a decent guided Capstone course. Be prepared to do a lot of work on your own as there is not a lot of structure or hand-holding. I am very proud to have completed a formal project/report that demonstrates how much I learned over the course of the IBM Data Science Certificate.

This course is excellent at teaching all the data science and machine learning skills from a practitioner's perspective. I would strongly recommend it to aspiring data science professionals. Other positives include free introduction to the IBM cloud platform.

Room for improvement include:

1. Improvement to reliability/availability of IBM Developer Skills Network (which was done towards the end of my course) or give it a miss (using IBM cloud platform instead) completely.

2. Assignments should be graded by instructors or through standardised testing. The current peer-graded system seems to be hit and miss. It is not ideal especially for such a long course.

There were quite a number of tools/apis in the course material that were no longer working, meaning they need to be updated and shows the course material has not been touched in quite some time. For absolute beginners this is problematic as they are not unsure where to search for solutions, and asking in the Discussion Forums does not always return an answer. Aside from that, I found the Capstone Project to indeed be challenging for the level of skills we have obtained from the course, but also figured it forces learners to really search and source for solutions similar to how the real world would force you to do so.

This course has been a real challenge for me. I've spent many more hours than planned to complete assignments of week1 and 2. I don't know if that is because of the topic I chose or because of the problems I had with Watson.

In the middle of the course, Watson stopped working ("monthly capacity reached"?). After asking for help in the forum, I didn't get any until 10 days later (and, by the way, what I was expecting). I somehow managed to install Juyputerlab as an alternative solution, but to do it properly and being able to publish some data into Github added more complexity to the challenge.