Of all the offerings in the specialization, this one felt like it was thrown together in less than hour. I expected to have to learn quite a bit of material on my own, but even the references to additional materials were very thin.

I could have saved many days if more guidance on the project workflow would have been given. The pre-processing of the data was quite extensive (9 steps before generating the ngram tables I used in my model) and was the key to getting decent results IMHO, but one had to step on a quite a few landmines to figure this out.

The problem was an interesting one and I ended up reworking it after passing with 95% (the only class in the specialization I didn't get 100% on) because I didn't have time to implement much of what I had to figure out by 'hard-knocks'

No physical way to complete the class within one session. Little is learned, no instruction is given, just build a thing that sort of works.

The course is outdated and abandoned by the teachers.

SwiftKey engineers are nowhere to be seen.

There is no guidance.

Not enough information on how to approach the final project. The project itself is very time consuming with lots of self learning and unclear specifications.

As other reviewers said, the Capstone is too unconnected to the rest of the specialization. In the end, there is no metric as to what makes your model successful, it's just the Slides and the appearance of the Shiny app that counts towards the total mark. Also, the topic (Natural Language Processing) is just too unconnected to anything seen in the other courses. It was fun, but felt a bit off.

None of the previous classes will prepare you for this one. This is not really a class, but rather a project on a topic NEVER covered in any of the previous classes in this specialization.

Unfortunately, the Data Science Capstone was the worst of all the courses in the specialization. Most of the techniques and models/theories needed to complete the capstone are not covered in the other courses, e.g. natural language processing, markov models, etc.

bad ending

I currently taking this capstone and I must unfortunately say that this is the most worst course in the whole specialization. Of course the topic NLP and word prediction is interesting, but the problem is, that this is a dead course. A couple of students in the forum strugeling with details, but there is NO Mentor, no Professor or other course staff and no SwiftKey engineer as announced in the Project Overview.

So everything you have to figure out completely by yourself and this takes a lot of more time than the 4-9 hours. And also why should you pay for a course where you learn anyway only ba your own.

Pick any intersting topic you would like to work on and invest the time in this instead of paying for this Capstone without any support form Coursera, JHU or SwiftKey.

A poor end to a poor Coursera specializations.