1. The course is very general and high level introduction.

2. During the lectures there are some examples that in some cases are presented as very small images and briefly. I personally could not understand some examples presented in week 5.

3. I found the hands-on lectures very helpful. I wish there was more that would delve into more examples in more details.

4. The course was very overpriced given the amount of information offered compared to other courses I have taken at coursera.

Thanks.

The topics addressed in this course are very valuable and cover a wide range. The presentation of the material unfortunately often misses clarity and sufficient detail. Backup material with a concise treatment and optional readings would be helpful. In addition it would be good to have several guided exercises that train hands-on skills, show practical features and integrate topics. The final assignment fits in this category, it however comes late and as a hike.

A good course taking into account that it does not require previous knowledge. I am giving "only" 3 stars because for a basic (no previous requirements) course I would expect much more additional readings. On the other hand, if you have programming or database experience you will find some topics too "basic".

I have liked it more than the first course on the specialization but I would expect more details (I think general topics are well explained).

I really wish I could give this course more stars, the content is great and well delivered and at a perfect level for someone like me who last worked with big data sets when 20Mb was absolutely enormous and Windows 3.1 was cutting edge technology. But and this seems to run across the whole specialisation, support from the course team varies between very patchy and none at all. Technical questions aren't answered for days if at all.

Good information overall, but the "peer graded" assignment at the end is poorly designed and seems unnecessarily arbitrary. Not a clear value add over a "final exam" format to justify waiting days for someone to "grade" your work. Instructions for this assignment are poorly written and unclear - for example, completely NOT clear you are asking us to identify a primary key versus stating there is no primary key, etc.

Though it contains useful concepts, the "hands on" assignments are not very instructive. I understand that the course is intended for general audience and programming or doing serious analysis might be out of its scope, but it falls short at providing a basic standing ground from which the learner could improve. Overall, it feels like the assignments and the lectures are intended for two disjoint target groups.

The course was okay, but the last Peer-graded Assignment was totally unclear. A lot of other students reported this problem on the discussion forum, but nobody handled this. Some students tried to ask questions, but any menthor answered back in merit. Of course if nobody understand the task then how can we rate each other? It is not fair. I think some examples can help on this problem.

I feel the assignments were a little vague and such assignments should be reviewed by mentors and not just fellow colleagues. Also, the concept on which the questions were based, were not covered that widely.

Additionally, if someone wants to refer to the slides in future they should be able to get the information they want from the slides itself, so they could be made more descriptive.

This course offers very useful high level overview of concepts and ideas which make you feel confident in the long run. However, the course is extremely basic and does not go deep beyond the high level concepts. The hands on exercises are boring and do not engage students. The course needs to be improved to make it more useful for students. This course is not very worthy of the money.

This is ok. There is some light theory and application of it, but even less hands-on. There is also too much of an emphasis on different big data systems and each brands specific uses. This is good information, but I think it could have been presented on a two page comparison chart. The next course is supposed to be more more hands-on, so I am looking forward to that

Thanks for offering this course. The course is not so good because most of the portion is theoretically based. We join the Coursera for hands-on courses. We study a lot of courses in our Homeland universities which are 90% theoretical. so I join Coursera to implement the concepts practically but this course is not so practical.

Definitely could have used more hands on practices. The hands on practice examples could've delved deeper into 'how' instead of just giving you the command lines to run. Majority of the times were spent on lectures talking about abstract concepts. While useful, more of that time would've been better spend on hands-on examples.

I spent lots of hours figuring out cloudera/quickstart ,however could not install some packages :)

Python 2 is not supported so it would have been nice to make some modifications as well. In the videos you are stating that the domain is changing really fast, while you haven't updated martials accordingly.

Fairly superficial treatment of a wide variety of topics. There was only a loose connection between some of the hands-on exercises and the lectures. The final assignment questions were not clear and the marking scheme was vague, which led to quite a bit of confusion while answering and grading it.

Although Content quality was good, the content is too much less and could have been easily integrated to first course or other course in specialisation.

Secondly Quiz were not challenging ,it was just too easy to pass, and this actually takes away the very reason they were employed in this course.

The course is great. The final peer-reviewed project is interesting, but very badly designed. The explanations are fairly confusing, and the peer-reviewed format really doesn't fit this assignement, as modeling can be performed in many different ways, that untrained peers might not recognize.

Expecting more hands on experience with big data frameworks like Hadoop or Spark. Instructions of the final assignment is very confusing, you don't actually know what it really want you to do until you go through all the Q&As in the discussion forum, which is really wasting time.

I felt there was very little continuity between each of the 6 weeks of this course. Especially in week 1, where I noticed a significant jump in the level of the content and I found the lectures quite vague and ambiguous. But overall I am satisfied. Looking forward to course 3.

The course takes a broad approach to the subject.

What I miss: the study material should provide more and better organized (theoretical) information (e.g. on topcis like database design, data structures, etc.)

What I like: presenting of current software projects around big data

The content is good, but the final assignment is ridiculous. The instructions are horrible, the peer reviewers are a joke (there are many people there with 0 experience with databases giving wrong feedback), and you don't get the answers for reviewing other people's works.

Very well organized and conceived. By following the course, I was able to learn and build on the concepts with minimal questions or frustration. It taught me what I was looking to learn, was well organized, and well paced. I’m already applying what I learned at work.

The course has a lot of information that is completely useful for BD, I feel that it needs more hand-on exercises. For example, all those BDMS they listed are very useful, but it would have been more practical and fun to teach with an exercise, rather than 50+ slides.

There has been very few on-hands training. It's still very very at an introductory level. At some points it goes very deep, for example with the vectors for a document, but with the rest stay at a very high level. Open an excel sheet can not be considered training ...

It was useful but I was expecting more specific exercies and practices with state of the art tools, instead of only a very high level conceptual resume of the frameworks and data types. I hope that in next specialization courses will go deeper into the specific uses.

F​ar too much time wasted on rudementary material. Maybe coursera wants to strech things out to milk folks in monthly fee. My time is valuable, and this is just wasting too much of it. I'll just buy a book on amazon and cut to the chase.