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Learner Reviews & Feedback for The Data Scientist’s Toolbox by Johns Hopkins University

4.6
stars
33,829 ratings

About the Course

In this course you will get an introduction to the main tools and ideas in the data scientist's toolbox. The course gives an overview of the data, questions, and tools that data analysts and data scientists work with. There are two components to this course. The first is a conceptual introduction to the ideas behind turning data into actionable knowledge. The second is a practical introduction to the tools that will be used in the program like version control, markdown, git, GitHub, R, and RStudio....
Highlights
Foundational tools

(243 Reviews)

Introductory course

(1056 Reviews)

Top reviews

LR

Sep 7, 2017

It was really insightful, coming from knowing almost nothing about statistics or experimental design, it was easy to understand while not feeling shallow. Just the right amount of information density.

SF

Apr 14, 2020

As a business student from Bangladesh who is aspiring to be a data analyst in near future, I love this course very much. The quizzes and assessments were the places to check how much I exactly learnt.

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6876 - 6900 of 7,122 Reviews for The Data Scientist’s Toolbox

By Ignacio S U

May 23, 2017

The course is extremely introductory and even though it may lead you to references you may use to self-teach yourself, it is not worth taking a four weeks course for a one week content. At the end of the week you will have about three new programs installed in your computer and no idea on how to use them for practical situations. Although it's intended as introductory, it surpasses that barrier to mere spectacle.

By Daniel P

Sep 9, 2019

In my opinion, the content of this course is too basic and little bit of topic for the data scientist specialization. Of course it is useful to be able to use git, shell etc. but I believe that most of the people already know those and the rest of the students can be redirected to relevant study material. All in all, there was about 90 minutes of relevant study in this course.

By Ben V

Sep 13, 2016

Very very introductory. I didn't find the tooling aspects of this course particularly helpful, but I'm not in the target audience. It's length was misleading -- I completed the work in two days easily, but I am a technologist, and already had the tools installed. If you use GitHub and RStudio, the meat of the course is only about an hour of the lecture.

By Daniel J R

Jun 19, 2018

Not very engaging videos. Superficial introduction to the mechanics of some tools without providing much context. Final submission did not work per video explanation. Need a more engaging presenter. Not quite at the level of Prof. Ng's Machine Learning course which I realy enjoyed and learned a lot from.

By Heather G

Mar 20, 2016

This should not be its own course, as it would be pretty useless if you were doing it on its own without doing any of the other courses. The end of course project literally being just to make a Github account and download R-studio could be quickly covered in the first week of the other courses.

By Raj K P

Nov 14, 2017

showing - doing things live in the video would have been great .. it seemed like explaining a PPT by an instructor. You could have taken one data set and have done all shorts of things and then in the midst thrown some quizzes to student instead of going though all the discussion in one go

By Lyn S

Aug 10, 2017

Not bad, but certainly not good. I cannot believe there is a style of teaching where you never get to see the best way to do something. I can slog thru the programming, but I doubt it's the best way to do something, but I never get to see how something should have been done.

By Eric J S

Aug 6, 2019

Very basic course. Poorly motivated, material presented without an effort to demonstrate why. This is not entirely out of place in this intro course, but it permeates the entire program. Difficulty poorly controlled, projects and quizzes much more advanced than lectures.

By George C

Jan 13, 2018

I personally think that this course should be better interwoven into the other modules of the data science specialization. It's a quick primer, but aside from that, not very valuable in terms of the information that it's providing. I wouldn't pay $49 to take this course.

By Thiên P T N

Jan 30, 2016

It is generally good course, but I feel it is just a combination of very little tools, skills and ideas. I believe it is quite complicate for me to understand, esspecial git and github. I think it is better to combine this course in other courses where you need it.

By valentine

Aug 27, 2016

Would like to have seen more material using git and git bash commands. More repetition here would be helpful. Seems like a lot of this information will be lost or forgotten when it comes time to use it, especially as it relates to the Data Science Specialization.

By Filip J

Nov 29, 2021

Good content, but course conducted by a machine is way worse then course conducted by a human being. Unfortunately it looses a lot of quality. I can understand that it is easier and more convince to update and change content but it is worse for a student.

By Desabandhu P

Sep 20, 2021

Course content is good. But the way of teaching is worst. It is because of the computer generated voice i.e text is converted to audio and we listen to that. It is extremely horrible and feeling bad without any interest. Natural way of teaching is best.

By Roy H

Jan 17, 2016

Dry videos. Most classes are someone showing how they do something their way, rather than guiding or teaching with the intent to have the student absorb and re-apply principles.

Very difficult for a student to absorb material from this video series

By Derek P

Jan 6, 2016

Hard to follow with a lot of technical intructions right off the bat with inadequate explanation, a lot of "read more about this at <insert URL>." Videos were boring and the instructor was invisible just reading off the slides. Not very engaging.

By Alexandre B S

Feb 11, 2020

This course should not be the first module of the specialization. Also, it lacks exercises and the content's explanation is not that deep and interactive, making the first course of the specialization boring and not caught student attention.

By Amouna

Mar 27, 2020

I definitely did not like the robot voice even though the course mentioned that it could be annoying. I wish there was more instruction involved, especially for beginners like myself. It was still confusing to complete some of the tasks.

By Tomasz Ć

Oct 9, 2023

Video voice is terrible! I understand the concept behind automated videos but the voice itself is just horrible! In times of A.I. I'm pretty sure you can make less robot, more human, and less boring and making yours eyes-shut voice.

By Michael S

Oct 4, 2020

Very disappointed in the quality of the videos. The voice-over is computer generated and takes too much focus. Luckily you can choose just to read it yourself. But this is not what I was expecting from Johns Hopkins and Coursera.

By Daryl A

Aug 17, 2020

The course needs to spend more time on how to init and push an item from RStudio to Git. I ended up having to watch a youtube video on how to do it. And all the comments show that this course did not prepare students how to do it.

By M. M A

Sep 19, 2020

The robot voice is a bother. If it is something experimental, the course should be free: students are human beings, not guinea pigs. There are better books and tutorials for installing and exploring the software.

By Tarunoday S

May 6, 2017

This module should not be kept as a separate piece...The steps mentioned in the lectures does not properly cover what is asked in the assignments.The lecture content needs to improve to cover the assignment

By Marie j

Feb 25, 2019

I found this informative but you do not get much in terms of service. One of the quiz has a technical issue and I made a complaint weeks ago, but I still haven't gotten a response. Nor has it been fixed.

By Alessandro V

Oct 22, 2016

It is too easy as a "university" course. It is much more like a pratictioner course. The final exam is ridiculous, really too easy.

It can be thought as a week course instead of a four week course.

By Eric L C

Jan 27, 2019

Presentation great. Quizzes are idiotic. You take the quiz, it tells you that you got an answer wrong but does not tell you why most of the time -- so no chance to learn from your mistakes.