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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Java for Android by Vanderbilt University

4.5
stars
3,031 ratings

About the Course

This MOOC teaches you how to program core features and classes from the Java programming language that are used in Android, which is the dominant platform for developing and deploying mobile device apps. In particular, this MOOC covers key Java programming language features that control the flow of execution through an app (such as Java’s various looping constructs and conditional statements), enable access to structured data (such as Java's built-in arrays and common classes in the Java Collections Framework, such as ArrayList and HashMap), group related operations and data into classes and interfaces (such as Java's primitive and user-defined types, fields, methods, generic parameters, and exceptions), customize the behavior of existing classes via inheritance and polymorphism (such as subclassing and overriding virtual methods). Learners will apply these Java features in the context of core Android components (such as Activities and basic UI elements) by applying common tools (such as Android Studio) needed to develop Java programs and useful Android apps. Learners will work on several hands-on projects throughout the MOOC, i.e., each week will require learners to write solutions to programming assignments that reinforce the material covered in the lecture videos. There will be roughly 4-6 hours of student engagement time per week, including video lectures, quizzes, and programming assignments....

Top reviews

RB

Aug 3, 2020

This course will provide all basic information of android and it will also help you to understand the fundamental of java which is used in android. It really help me to improve my skills in android.

SV

Jun 27, 2018

Excellent !! As a beginner I found this course a major kick-start to building a strong base for my Android app skills. A lot of practice needed though, but these videos would keep me going well

Filter by:

701 - 725 of 809 Reviews for Java for Android

By Chirag S

•

Nov 17, 2021

nice

By Chetan P

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Jul 19, 2021

good

By Armand T D N

•

Dec 20, 2020

Good

By GAUTHAM P S

•

Mar 23, 2020

Good

By Lalith M

•

Apr 2, 2019

good

By SINGU S V T C

•

Oct 11, 2018

good

By Rajat P

•

Apr 9, 2016

good

By Patrick H (

•

May 21, 2016

Now that I have completed the course I'd like to give some feedback on how I think it was.

1. Quizzes are horrible. The fact we get no feedback on incorrect answers is not very helpful. There are only 3 quizzes where I missed just one question but no matter what, I can't get them correct. It would be helpful if there was some explanation why an answer your selected was wrong, a hint or something. Also while some of the quiz answers are obvious from watching the lessons, some are totally not and if someone doesn't have ANY programming experience I think they would find some questions almost impossible to answer. I have a programming background and out of all the quizzes I just missed 1 question on 3 of them, but I've been trying to answer them again, and again, and again and I just can't get them right. If there was feedback after taking a quiz I'm sure it would of helped. For those 3 quizzes, I took them so many times all the other answers are memorized and I just keep trying to get that one right. It's not helpful and then it turns into a "just keep selecting different things until it's right" thing instead of understanding it.

2. The course says it's for beginners to programming but I beg to differ. I think the way the material is presented and how the assignments are laid out I do not think someone(or not many people) would have gotten through that Week two ascii assignment. I thought they assignments in some cases were harder than the lessons. Maybe it's because they way they were explained in the lessons which brings me to #3

3. I do not think the instructors use the best/most clear examples to present the material to students. There are many easier examples to teach about looping than showing an Ascii art example. Because not only does the student have to grasp the concept of loops, then also have to think about ascii print logic. I think to someone with no experience would get pretty lost pretty quickly in this course. Some of the things explained in the lessons I would actually look up other videos of other people explaining it to get a clearer picture.

4. Some material is not consistent. Like in some assignments the text is wrong, for the Account code example, you never really mention the mOut or the interface the class uses which are in the example files and what to do with them when you write the other constructors (The course goes over this later when talking about the constructors and calling a constructor from another constructor but not that early on when you're working with the Account example files

5. It seems this course really isn't fully developed yet and is still going through it's growing pains

Overall, I would say there are many other courses that are far better at teaching the basics of Java. For me, since I do have some Java experience and a programming background it wasn't too bad, But I'm thinking of the guy who has never touched a line of code before. I just don't think the course does a good enough job at explaining things to someone like that.

I really hope the next courses in the specialization are better organized than this because starting with the next course because the next ones are more important to me than this course was only because of my prior background

By Yulim L

•

Nov 10, 2020

Make sure you meet the deadlines for peer review, this course does not let you "re-enroll" to the next session and thus you may end up not completing the course before it ends.

As well, this course is ok for learning Java and ONLY BASIC JAVA, it is terrible at teaching how to create apps!

If you are truly new to coding, or even just to creating apps or more complex code, I do not recommend this certification (i.e. the next 4 courses) at all. It is NOT BEGINNER FREINDLY, there is no longer any support from profs, and it is very out of date. If, like me, you only know enough code to just barely program sensor or do MatLab, you will struggle.

If you are a beginner or even just unfamiliar with Android Development, I suggest you learn from free tutorials online instead. If you want the certificate, I strongly suggest you take additional time to learn from other sources along with what is provided - in fact, I say skip the "optional assignments" and make mini test apps from other tutorials. You will also need to learn new classes, libraries and framework such as Room, Retrofit, RxJava, Hilt. Other components you should learn, since these courses will not cover, are any UI components (EditText, layouts, creating images, buttons, menus, etc), fragments, the MVVM pattern, etc.

tldr: don't take this certification expecting them to teach you all you need to know to create a simple app, or even pass their capstone without significant effort on your own part to learn elsewhere.

By Ronie M

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Feb 2, 2020

Good course but the peer review is not.

Checking the submissions should not be OFFLOADED to the students.

Code review (peer review) is a good way to collaborate and find issues but it will not work on a MOOC. Why?

(1) We are not a team, we are individuals who study by ourselves and we have different timelines. One individual might finish the course in one week, others might be in a month. This is the reason why we see a lot of posts on the discussions asking for code review.

(2) A lot of people here are just beginners which results to subjective reviews. Good reviews come from those with experience (should be the instructors).

(3) Plagiarism - it hurts my eyes seeing duplicated works.

By Rajesh R

•

Nov 18, 2018

The contents you will learn in this lesson is JAVA Core mostly. I had a JAVA Functional Programming experience which didn't let this level trouble me a lot but if you are completely new, and taking this course, be ready to find out good quality time with these modules. Sometimes, I felt that the course should give 10 days for one segment instead of a week but although you can reset your deadlines.

The course did not in detail focused on Data Structures which is also a key component in JAVA and Android if you think of robust apps. Also, there can be few more assignment added to each week for practice.

It has been a good journey with all the support and care from Coursera!

By Andrew O

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Jul 8, 2019

In my opinion, the lectures talk a little bit too much about "what" they are going to teach you, rather than actually teaching you. I had to skip the parts of the videos where they were talking incessantly, so I could actually learn the syntax and how to apply the code. Also, this class is kind of old, and the material seems to have been reused several times. Other than that, it's a generally informative course for those wishing to learn basic java.

By Ethan R

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Jun 21, 2018

The content is generally expressed and you must have previous knowledge of programming.also one of the teachers teaches artificial and unacceptable and he is not fluent in how to explain the content. His name is Michael Walker. they And also all of the teachers just represent the title and they do not deeply involve in discussions. At first they say you only need 4-5 hours in a week to do everything but you practically need 18 hours per week.

By Stefan S

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May 8, 2016

Good course in general but it could use more exercises and solutions for those exercises. It could be a great course in future

Also, sometimes it's confusing like you are asked to download code and write it along with the video but the files already (at least partially) contain the code that you should write and it looks quite different from the video.

By Hunter G

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Apr 13, 2017

It provides me with exercises to practice but some of the videos explain things awfully or just not at all. Others are good. The discussion boards are helpful. I just wish they didn't talk as much about what something is as opposed to how it works. Many videos often don't show any code or very little which makes understand syntax difficult.

By Carolina A

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May 23, 2018

The course content good, but I take 2 stars away because it is wrong to say it is for beginners and people who are new to coding/programming.

It has taken me a significant amount of time and effort to provide the assignments on time, the lessons and the material provided are not enough to solve the assignments.

By Muhammed A Ç

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Sep 19, 2021

Lectures were pretty explanatory but coding assignment were irrelevant to real world problems. I am not saying that they are not helping to improve your algorithmic thinking. But because there is no goal in coding assignments relative to real world, I find it pretty boring and not encouraging

By Ivan K

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May 18, 2016

The course is nice, lectures is fine.

But assignments is a bullshit. The instructions are uncertain, with typos. There is random number used, and you have to do magic with your algorithm in order to match expected output. I strongly dislike it.

By shashank p

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May 26, 2020

it does have good explanations for topics but the assignments are kind of tough for beginners in programming. I had a lot of trouble on some assignments where I even had to ask others for advice and program which should not be the case.

By Debaditya S

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Jul 4, 2019

The peer review assignment system is the worst....it demands 5 reviews and am still not able to fetch a single one......had to plead to so many unknown people in the discussion forums yet no response..............i hate this.

By Scott W

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Aug 10, 2016

Its a solid java class that has almost 0 android learning. If you are expecting any kind of Android related learning. you will get none this is 100% a java class that just runs in the android environment.

By Reyadath U

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Aug 24, 2020

A lot of times it felt like someone reciting a text book on Java rather than taking a proper class. Often times the instructor use terms that have not been covered previously which causes great difficulty.

By Abanoob S

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Apr 26, 2021

To be honest, this course didn't help me much. I learned very little from him. I did not understand the tests at a high level. I think it was very difficult, but it wasn't impossible.

By Prabhjot S

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May 24, 2019

In my opinion, this mooc has pretty hard assignments to do, for basic things like 'for loop', they had created such tough assignments which require high thinking & logic.

By João P A M

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May 17, 2016

I liked the course contents, but in my opinion the slides should be more modern, and the main idea in each lesson should get more highlight, and the ideas to retain too.