In Course 4, week 3, an assignment (EfficientMarkovModel) is poorly explained, and understandable only with the context of the following text. This was initially confusing to me. Otherwise, I found the course to be similarly good as the previous ones.

Some interesting concepts are being taught, but the course is uneven. The first project required a lot of work, while the last week had no project at all.

Minor errors in videos and programming assignments. Somewhat messy code.

while the course is structured well, there is almot zero support when one gets stuck. Coursera has not maintained an active forum, unlike other platforms. It ends up wasting a lot of time for us.

Near the end of the course it was very difficult to get programs working exactly as intended. I felt the instructions could have been clearer, especially in Week 3's assignments.

Principles are usually explained with code where analogies or schematics would have been more appropriate.

Quizzes are sometimes poor.

Help is hard to get on the forum.

Please show the quiz answers for verification purpose since we have to buy the course to submit answers

Poor level of support and detail. Problems are getting hard - not enough resources available.

Good Course, but in my perspective the teachers could explain better.

not as good as the previous ones in the specialization.

Pros:

There are a lot of interesting subjects - the basics of the cryptography (the Caesar cipher, the vigenere cipher), the practical use of the markovs model to generate funny texts, some basics with image filtering and if you dont use course IDE blueJ and duke libraries and found how to do this thing with java core - it will be more profitable.

Cons:

Using custom libraries is very bad for students. We must study java core not some custom libraries.

BlueJ also is a bad choise, even the notepad or the vim are better for understanding the compilation process.

Several tasks and questions are hardly to understand since they are badly formulated.

Also there is no peer reviewed assignments.

Many of the assignments in week three were incredibly hard to understand and required scouring the forums to locate where other classmates had to beg instructional staff for assistance. In many instances, the staff agreed that the course had many shortcomings that would be addressed in "upcoming iterations" of the course. However, many of these posts were made up to three years ago, so it made the student feel that not only did the class have errors that the staff did little to address for new cohorts, but also that the updating of the curriculum is not a priority and therefore that the class is now an afterthought.

Two of the weeks were really complicated, confusing and badly explained. Made me feel that I did not learn enough in the last courses when in fact the problem was this course itself. They need to improve the explanations as it is the most complicated course and the videos are short and unclear. More videos, more explanations for the exercises, and more efficient mentors at the forums when we have questions is a must if you want 5 stars.

Bad sources formatting, bad codestyle and bad project design

week 2 is broken

There are a large number of people requesting help with the content in week 3 of this course. Many of them state the assignments need clarification, while others have made significant progress on the assignments but are requesting additional help understanding. Few of these threads in week 3 have been addressed, and I notice many of these threads date back for up to 2 years.

I have subscribed to this course three times in hopes of persevering, but I can't justify spending any more money when so many students are receiving no replies when asking for help.

thanks for the course, but

-your quizzes is real pain, some random variable could cause wrong result

-your should follow how it is implemented in lectures in stupid way, like "efficient" way when you build hash map N^2 instead of N

-bluej sucks you make a lot of clicks to run method, use some decent IDE like eclipse or idea

A very simplistic and chaotic course. Explanations are all over the place.

BlueJ is probably the worst IDE I have ever seen and I have been a programmer for about 8 years.

There are far better courses. I would not recommend this course at all.

Sometimes the quiz instruction is not very clear. Sometimes, I could get the assignment results, pass the practice quiz, but couldn't pass the review quiz.

So bad, I really don't understand the concepts introduced in this course.