It would be better for the course to focus on using scikit-learn for machine learning. The course focuses on using GraphLab (https://turi.com/download/academic.html), which is a commericial product, free for academic use. I'm doing this course for professional purposes and my preference is to gain familiarity with free/open source solutions that I will be later able to utilise in production environment.

To be honest, this course is not friendly to windows 10 users because it forces students to use the apple Inc's Turicreate instead of the most popular sklearn. Admittedly, windows 10 users can still install the Turicreate by WSL but not everyone wants to add a subsystem to their windows just for this course. Except for this, this course has a nice structure and the content is really practice-oriented.

I found the Course very interesting, well prepared from the Tutors and I liked the case study Approach since it provides actual examples where Machine Learning can be realized. I am interested to enroll in the second Course of the certificate to validate if it will go into more Details and Background regarding the build of the algorithms theoretically and in Python. I would like to thank both Tutor

While I am aware that this is an overview of the other courses in the specialization, I felt that the quizzes and programming exercises didn't really get into the actual topic. For example the recommender systems quiz and programming assignment have nothing about factorization except a single superficial question. The material is clear and the overview is nice, but the practical part let me down.

A nice ML overview that introduces many tools without going into detail on how they work. Pro: Loved the programming assignments, nice Jupyter notebooks. Con: found the constant hyping of the Capstone course (which got cancelled) frustrating. The GraphLabCreate software was neat to see and easy to use, but ultimately I preferred the more first principles approach of Andrew Ng.'s ML intro course.

This is a good introductory course, however the quiz questions and over dependence of graphlab are off putting. The instructors share good insights about the need and motivation for various ML techniques. I wish there was more support on the project using pandas and sklearn. Graphlab is immensely powerful, however not adopted in industry making it hard to apply the learning in real world.

Pretty high level overview. I guess it's necessary to give a roadmap for where the concentration leads, but I wonder if each lesson couldn't have been added in its respective module, or if at least the Foundations Module couldn't be shortened a little - or alternatively made a bit more challenging. I'm on the first real module now and the change in difficulty is quite significant.

This course is for you if you really don't know anything about Machine Learning and nothing about Python. If you do know something about it, look for a different course.

I learned the most from lesson 5 and 6 about recommenders and deep learning because I knew nothing about these subjects.

The programming exercises are disappointing: just cut and paste. I found this demotivating.

I wish they used open source tools for this. I will not be paying for a GraphLab account nor do I see myself using it in the future. I felt less inclined to strain over learning the API and was unused by the technologies. Other than that the course is pretty interesting as I was able to apply some cool data analysis using ML practices I've learned in other Coursera courses.

The course was good, and the instructors did a good job. There don't seem to be any mentors in the forums who are helping, and the library used for the exercises was changed from the one in the lectures. The specialization seems to have been abandoned before they published courses 5 and 6, so ignore every time they talk about how great the capstone project is going to be!!

Lectures are great. Unfortunately, i can' t install graphlab create on my windows 10 labtap.I wasted two whole day on it!!!!! I tried every methods google told me, all fail or with bugs. I think pandas and sklearn are far more user friendly.不建议大陆使用windows的朋友尝试安装graphlab create，标准安装方式即使用了VPS也网络链接失败，用anaconda安装的话，anaconda3可以安装，但是没有canvas功能，anaconda2各种奇怪报错。搞了两天失败，我还是用sklearn。

This course needs to be updated. Windows don't support TuriCreate or Graphlab. Because it works on python 2. But now python 3.8 has come and TuriCreate doesn't work in it either. So, I had to use Ubuntu in my virtual box to work on the assignments. The course wasn't bad. But if they update the course, it will be a great one for beginners in machine learning.

I think it was a good introductory course. However, I think it was too simple: assignments required no more than copy+paste from the lectures.

I understand the primary goal is to hook people up on how good graphlabs is, but I'd rather leaarn numpy, sklearn and other widely available tools. At least show both in the leactures. Please :)

This course presents an overview of different machine learning tools but I rather prefer starting from the second course were more specific competencies are given. I believe that in courses like this the contents are to sparse.

It would serve as an introduction. But the contents of week 4 and 5 are not even in the specialization!

The course teaches a a lot of information and explains everything from a beginners POV which is great. I only have 2 issues with this course, the use of proprietary software instead of all open source software and NO CONTINUED SUPPORT for about 3 years since the course has been out. Either update the specialization or cancel it.

Wanted a course on ML. Could not find anything except this. Therefore decided to take it. However not so sure Turi Create/Graphlab is the best option (had installing issues as a Python beginer). Was it worth to use it instead of Scikit learn? Also I would expect closer connection between quiz tasks and study material.

Good for start in machine learning concepts. Good because they use Jupyter Notebook an python (they use python 2, it would be better 3). But I don't like much the graphlab library for data frames. And also the quizzes are a bit difficult. You have no the whole information in the documentation to solve them.

The content is really good, well explained=> 5 stars, nothing to add.

Why the 3 stars then ? Graphlab. If you use the pydata stack, as it is said to be possible in every assignments, you get stuck on the quizz due to variations on data and the algorithm used, so you can't really get quite the same answers.

Videos were too short to go into details. Too much reliance on the package they development themselves, though I appreciated the simplicity, I don't get to learn about a lot of technical details. So you know how to run a image retrieval model without knowing what are the deep features, for example.

Good course, learned a lot of basics. I think this course is rather old though and getting a lot of the required software up and running required a lot of work since there are much newer versions available now. I found that I had to do a little extra to get the older packages working in Jupiter.

The course content is great. It gives overview on what is going to be learned in details in the next courses. Considering that it is an introductory course and the fact that it utilizes the GraphLab library as tool, I believe it is overpriced compared to the other courses of the specialization.

The whole eco-system is based on Graphlab create which is not very commonly used in the industry. The "Programming assignments" are very much like the exercise done in the videos - so no real thought and effort were needed. The Deep learning part is really bad thought and bad examined.

The enthusiasm of the instructors was the best thing about this class. But I really wanted a more rigorous methodology - and didn't really get it here. But it was an alright introduction to machine learning but not enough if you want to know what makes the 'black box' work.

Pros:

(1) Teachers know what they are talking.

(2) They are energetic and funny.

Cons:

(1) The course uses proprietary and expensive tool.

(2) The course is too simplistic.

(3) The teachers, although they know what they are talking about, they aren't very good at teaching.

Good with concepts. But would have been better if a standard library like scikit were used rather than SFrames, Turicreate and Graphlab for the sake of easing things out which actually is not very convenient for a lot of students. (atleast during the learning cycle)