Wrongly assumes that it'll be easier for students to jump from the conventional 'parallel' java paradigms and constructs to parallel streams.

Not a good job on explaining why. It'll require from students some efforts to create the right picture in their minds.

Exercises are great and partially make up for the above mentioned shortcomings.

Some example code is very bad and goes against all the 'good' things being taught by Martin in the first course of the specialization.

Interesting course, but far too short. It ends up giving a quick introduction to some of the aspects of parallel programming. I enjoyed the assignments, apart from last one where the difficulty was more about the context of the example than any parallel programming aspects. That example, extended, could be a good capstone project, but I think it was not appropriate as a course assignment. I prefer courses that follow a book, and this course didn't.

Not friendly with beginners in Scala. You will be presented with tons of Scala code with minimal detailing on algorithms. Obviously the lecture expects you to be quite familiar with Java and Scala. And the lecture is not very informative either (at least for green hands in Scala). I found that the best way that works for me is to pause at each slide, study the code, and then go on to see what the lecture has to say.

I didn't like the last assignment. I didn't think there was much to learn there. I would've liked to implement more splitters and combiners. I did like the first 3 assignments very much. The lectures were pretty good, but I found myself loving some, and hating the others. I would've preferred more practical applications over theory. I think the lectures are un-necessarily math heavy.

Content is good, less well polished than Odersky's courses though. Painful exercises with a lot of time spent on understanding the instructions instead of focusing on learning parallelism methods (especially the final assignment). Overall happy to have learnt from this, but clarity of assignments should be improved.

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.

This course could have been better in my opinion, if we could have exercise that would deal with the concepts in more detail. I felt myself involved deeply in understanding the problem statement, rather than practicing the concepts explained in the course.

Good content. Very basic overview of parallel programming algorithms and data structures in scala. Course feel a little bit hacked together although not as bad as the Functional Program Design one.

Course should be more in depth.

Online video is OK. But assignments are not much related to parallel programming specific issues. One case, this is my opinion but it's nice if students learn how scala solves "The dining philosophers" issue.

Good course. But I have a strong feeling that would be nice to have more focus on the practice. Some lecture not really much with the results of assignments. Good course anyway. Pavel

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

Good course and good level on the assignments but needs a lot of improvement on the lectures, specially in the two last weeks.

Lectures are not easy to understand. It almost feels like they plucked various sections from a longer course.

There are not clear test errors, that points to another place in code where mistake is placed.

Deep lectures, but exercises where more about complex problems than about parallel programing

Too much imperative technics in this "functional" parallel programming course.

The course if good, but i believe the content should be more didactic.

Good but too theoretical and not very didactic.

For now, the worst course in Specialization.

Not enough Scala. Akka version was better :(

should contain more details

exercise are too heavy

The course presents two core approaches to parallel programming - task and data parallelism. While these concepts are really useful, I expected more details on, for example, how to implement the _parallel_ construct used throughout the lectures. The materials were good and I can use some of the ideas straight after the lectures in my everyday coding, but the assignments were really slightly related to the topic.

Barnes Hut simulation assignment. I'd say it has nothing in common with parallel programming in Scala. It looks like the authors looked for some real-life example or use case for Combiners and this simulation model looked nice. But, really, does any developer not working in university would ever use it? It's completely impractical, the most of the time I spent reading the description of simulation model, but the coding itself was just playing with 2D coordinates and some basic recursion. I'd expect something more practical, e.g. implementing simplified form of Hadoop map-reduce or something like that so I can use it after the course. But Barnes-Hut is too specific and is pretty far from everyday problems developers encounter.

For a while, that's the worst course of scala specialization. All the parallelism is just obvious division of a one big piece on several small pieses, and perfrom parrallel tasks on it. It's enogh to write merge sort with several threads to get the main idea, which is proposed here. You don't need to watch 4 weeks of coursera video and perform tasks to get it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I expected something more than trivial division. Besides that, I don't like the tasks. And I hate the last one week. Very bad description of the problem, it made me really suffer. I'd like much more the first 2 courses. Which I rated as 5 and 4 accordingly, but this one is fail. Besides that, I like the theory about parallel and concurent programming, and all the stuff about "iron". Hope the 4th one course will be better.

Excellent lectures, let down by the difficulty of the assignments.

While the tutors clearly know their stuff, I found the assignments really quite challenging and of limited educational value due to the mixture of new concepts introduced by the lectures along with new (to me) mathematics or CS that also needed to be grasped.

I'm an experienced professional programmer with the EPFL 'FP in Scala' and FRP courses under my belt, so I thought I knew what to expect but this was much more time consuming than I'd thought.