Excellent course. Gives deep enough understanding of parallel programming. Used knowledge immediately to optimize my huge in-mem data structure to reach 50 ms (instead of 300 ms) response time. I'd suggest the following to improve: 1. I'd make "pass" score no less then 90 or even 95%. With 80 only it is possible to PASS having key mistake (e.g. on week4 I haven't created a new combiner, using old one, in combine() operation, and I still got 80 - PASSED) 2. tests in grader are hard to reproduce on local machine: it is not that obvious what's wrong, where to focus.

Very good. Only things I wish were better is more comments in some assignments and more prepared tests. Also I miss not having "Statement of Accomplishment" like some other Scala courses :-(.

For this course you should have Advanced English level. Cause sentesce construction is so difficult and words so unusual that i had to some times google what i have to do.

Most of the concepts and explanations were good but the assignments could be better organized. I wasn't sure what I was doing for a while, and the test cases don't cover the code in a way that progresses naturally. Some parts of it can't be tested until most of the code is written, and then major portions of the code isn't even tested until it's submitted. It would be great if the tests progressed along with the code and people didn't have to guess at the correct solution but just knew it was right when they got it.

Really good course covering some of the fundamentals of parallel programming, though for me I was hoping it would go into some of the Scala specifics a little more

Too difficult, especially the last week, especially for person without strong math background. I felt that material from the two last weeks is important and necessary to grasp PP, but speed should be slower.

I think the best way to improve this course would be splitting 3 and 4 weeks to obtain 6 weeks course like the first one in the specialization.

Its a very good course! perhaps the in the practice code, before jumping into the problems they can provide a couple of simple examples/questions such that the main ideas are learnt.

It requires more effort on undestanding the algorithms involved in the problems, rather than paralelism and its techniques. Instead of 4 weeks it would benefit of an additional week - for those who take the course after the regular work hours at their job. So 5 weeks would be more adequate.

The course is good but is not focused on scala features. It is more generic parallel programming approach.

Awesome course to learn parallel programming and advantage of scala to achieve this.

Learned how to think algorithms in parallel being careful that it's not always better to do everything in parallel.

The only thing I didn't like that much is that the course has too many mathematical explanations and maybe that lectures should be optional for those that want to go further.

Appreciate the time spent by the authors to prepare all the course materials and the assignments. Everything clear and relatively self-contained. However, I still do not feel to be an expert in parallelism.

The course was really good. Got to learn so much about parallel programming with that course. The explanation level is very basic and any Computer Science related person can easily grasp the concepts

Good course but scala understanding is required for this course. So please register for prior course in the certification task to easily complete this course.

I learned very useful programming techniques, but I'm a bit lost as to whether these techniques are "good practices" or if they are "existing parallel programming features in Java, transposed as-is in Scala"

It would be great to have some tests for understanding algorithms (like in algorithms course), not only practice programming assignments. Assignments are really interesting but can't verify your understand material or not. Also it is possible to pass assignment event if you have mistakes in the code.

Some instruction is pretty confusing

Interesting course but math part is too academic and boring. It'll be more useful if focused only in real use cases.

Good course with a lot of interesting ideas and explanations. The reason I gave it a 4 and not a 5 is that I think it would have been better without involving instructors' own library on top of Scala instead of teaching Scala-level constructs directly. While I appreciate the notion of teaching general parallel programming ideas, introducing one's own constructs to promote it seems unnecessary - at the very least, these constructs' implementation should have been thoroughly explained in the course.

Really cool course. I'm enjoying scala as a language as it has many simple methods to achieve complex goals, including parallelization, however this course also presents parallelism in a rawer fashion explaining in depth some of the techniques to parallelize seemingly sequential-only tasks.

Last week's exercise is quite long, and albeit being a truly beautiful project, most of the implementation is not strictly related to parallel programming.

In any case a totally good course!

Very interesting course, I would recommend. I always wanted to learn about Scala parallel collections.

Presentations were presented well and the assignments were interestingly varied but quite challenging for the newbie.

exercise are too heavy

In my view, this course was nowhere near as good as the earlier courses by Prof Odersky. The materials and pacing seemed all over the place - in some cases excessive time was spent going through quite trivial concepts, while elsewhere the course seemed quite rushed when looking at much more complicated ideas.

Most of assignments are good. They show applications of parallel programming very well. Some lectures are booring? but important. For instance, lectures about assotiativity.

This course was okay, but I feel it could use some work. For starters:

-I feel some of the longer assignments should be split up into several weeks (the Barnes-Hut one for example, since there's a lot to implement and it took a while to understand conceptually).

-I feel that some parts of the assignment specs could be more clear. For example, in the K-means assignment, it was mentioned to use the "square distance" between the means to determine if the algorithm had converged or not and I feel it would be useful to provide a mathematical formula here (or at least give the name of the formula i.e., Pythagorean).

-I wish there was more focus on making the assignments practical instead of something that's more sophisticated. For example, it would've been nice to have an assignment for week 4 that allowed us to practice implementing a variety of parallelizable data structures and focus on making them as efficient as possible.