I expected the course to cover more ground on the Google Cloud Platform, especially given the price tag. You get to dip your toes in different tools Google offers, and some examples can be a little out of date.

As an IT project manager, I was hoping to spend valuable time on Google big data and cloud computing fundamentals to aid me in my work as a project manager.

I didn't like to do hand on labs!

I enjoyed the lectures from Carolyn Ujcic the best. Out of all the instructors, she was the only one who made me feel like I was learning something from these crypto-marketing videos.

for video, tall too much but not efficent enough; for the lab, i cannot understand why it has so many repeat steps, why cannot just put those similiar lab into one.

The basic fundamentals in this module#1 is ok, but gets very arcane as it progresses. Need before and after screen shots for every lab step, lacking details.

I was really only interested in data engineering. This course is pre-requirement for the Data engineering spec and i had to go through a lot of ML content.

Most of the materials of this course can be freely found con Google Codelabs. If it was 50% off maybe it could be worth a shot but not at the 55$ pricetag.

too easy but takes too long, poorly designed. You just copy and paste in code provided by google. There are places where if you mis-click you are doomed.

The Labs were 75% repetitive setup and comparatively little information. Also, there was very little on the 'why' of certain choices.

Labs were not useful to get the feel of the platform, overall very poor coverage of such an interesting topic.

It is very basic and don't have details. New person will find it difficult to understand what is going on

Labs were not so great, long provisioning time and high amount of tedious setup repetition

A very basic hands-off course just introducing to some GCP products.

There is no practice in deep of GCP tools, tasks are really guided.

This is just and introduction to google products and that's it.

Meh, more like a sales pitch rather than actual course content

Mostly useless blahblah with only few pieces of information

Sells too much Google and do not explain important things.

Not a great course for learning. Didnt focus on concepts

you should let the students program.

many labs doesn't work

Not much content

TL;DR: I sadly have to say that this course was absolutely not worth the time. I would recommend anyone looking to get started with Google Cloud to just go through the examples in the Google Code Labs, since you'll get about the same information in a much smaller timeframe.

I can't recommend this course to anyone for the following reasons:

(1) For the most part, it feels more like a Google self promotion than an educational class.

(2) Most of the content in this course is based on the exercises from Google Codelabs (or rather, they link you to the exercise on the google platform), which themselves are all right. The video lectures, however, rarely add anything of value, definitely not with respect to the amount of time they take to complete. Overall, a rather low "production value"/"-quality" compared to other courses in Coursera.

(3) The course attempts to showcase how easy some complicated tasks are in Google Cloud Engine. However, you're just given the task to execute long and rather complicated scripts that Google has provided just for this course. Those scripts and what happens in the background is not explained in depth, instead it's often emphasized how easy everything is with GCE. No mentions of what to do when you DON'T have a huge amount of code already provided by Google.

(4) The course content is not adapted well for the Coursera format. Around 50 chapters, partly only with 15 second videos, so you have to scroll a lot and it's hard to see how content was intended to be grouped. The tests/mutliple choice exams are also very badly done, feels like they were made with the lowest amount of effort possible.

Very raw. Have to restart labs several times, because sometimes they just do not work. Just that (like there should be a button(exists in video), but you can't find it). Very frustrating. Not to mention that for your own money they are advertising google-cloud to you... :)

Google cloud itself is buggy for now...

On technical side of the course: it is made to maximize the number of sections and videos. Just like some ... code that maximizes lines of code. Yes, it's like 10 second videos in the separate section. Many of them. I like short 3-10 min videos, but 10 second ones? Labs that officially take 1h, but if google cloud is not bugging it is 15-30 min. Labs where instructions tell you to stop half way through, because the rest would be in the next lab!!! (so you would have to redo those steps, yeah). Probably maximizing the number of labs too... Lots of frustration!

Shoddy material, quickly thrown together. Non-paying users cannot access labs. Why even allow them to enroll then ? Does not require Machine Learning to extrapolate a scenario where such a user is going to get frustrated and ask questions: "Where can I find the lab? or Why isn't my button to start the lab working?".