Almost exclusively peer marked assessment and although you can learn from peer marking there is no incentive for other people to mark your work properly. Many people just appear to give everything full marks and the comment "great" or "nice" or even just a full stop to meet the comment requirement. When not giving full marks not one person put a comment to explain why they haven't given full marks and if the person marking your work doesn't fully understand the material they are just as likely to mark it correct when it is not as they are not sure about the material.

This course provides the essential foundations that a rookie need to master partial SQL and the basic techniques for drawing entity relation diagrams. All in all, it's a good course to embark on your journey for exploring database. However, some part of the video is kind of redundant. There are three points that I would like to mention. First, The peer-evaluation system. In other CS course, a grading system is prepared to give marks on student's assignment, which is more objective; Second, this course provides a link to buy textbook, rather than providing student the access to free online resources; Third, week7 material, upon functional dependency and BCNF are not clearly elaborated.

Avoid this course by all means. This is absolutely the worst course that I have ever enrolled and seriously I still can't understand how coursera allows such courses to exist.

The material is very basic and it has a single reference for a paid book but the absolutely worst part is that the GRADING SYSTEM DEPENDS ON THE AVERAGE EVALUATION OF TWO OTHER RANDOM CLASSMATES. So you realize that even if your submission is perfect you end up getting random grades depending on the mood of your classmates and you can't do anything about it.

I have just added University of Colorado in my blacklist because seriously this course is a disgrace for online courses.

Not enough implication from the instructors in the course. Students are left alone with the material, without any answers to there questions on the course.

Peer review process subject to personal interpretation and leading to frustration for the students.

That's quite unfortunate as this provides a bad experience whereas the course might have been good without that.

A lot of fluff is included, but taught the basics of SQL and entity relationship diagrams and normalisation, which to be pretty integral parts of understanding databases in a practical sense.

excellent content. the forum is dead and there are some mistakes in the school solution that couldn't be address for that reason. 5 start for content, 1 star for staff participation and discussion forum.

Quite outdated

The course syllabus is well scoped out. But the delivery is terrible - unclear or lack of explanation, boring presentation (sometimes uneven speech pace), poor slides content. I use the syllabus content as a guide and refer to external material (youtube etc.) for the proper explanation of various topics.

The course is hardly intermediate level, I would put it at basic/beginner. Too much meta-discussions - probably 1-2 minutes of substance for each 6+ minute video. Very few examples for each concept (usually 1, rarely 2).

Most of the material I had to find outside of the course in order to complete the assignments. The professor just read from slides and did not show any hands on work like in other coursera classes. Weekly peer reviews were a disaster and not a reliable system if your grade depends on them. I submitted the same work twice, the first time I got a 66 and the second a 90. It seems that some people are not aware of what the rubric entails and you are penalized for it until someone else reviews your work again. Would suggest trying another database class offered.

A very boring way to bring up the subject.

Presenter's style is way too boring. It felt like he was just reading a book. Every video contains more part of introduction and summary rather than actual content. Made me lose interest in online courses!

The course is very intense, need a lot of practice. A little boring when I took this course, course the tutorial and the forms of the course if boring for me. But you can quiet a lot about basic sql syntax and ERD modeling. And the assignment is not well designed, the classmate reviews take a lot of time , should be improved, like each assignment just upload one file, should do some automatic tools for the assignment reviews.

In addition to outdated information in the query section, and some unnecessary focus on female genitalia in some assignments, the teaching is poor.

The videos and curriculum do not focus on how to make good database management decisions. Instead, they focus on how to make good /diagramming/ decisions based on requirements.

The presenter seems to go out of his way to avoid explaining core concepts, and instead breezes over them with ambiguous business-sounding definitions. Most videos, especially later on, feel like they go out of their way to complain about how students "just don't get it" and focus on how to draw diagrams correctly instead of make good choices for organizing a database.

If your goal is to understand more about databases and how to manage them, this course is not for you.

If your goal is to become really good at diagramming databases, this might work, but is still a poor quality course.

This course covered basic information. However, the organize about assignments is horrible. Tables format change from time to time, and the solution does not even match with questions.

Personally they should add a free textbook and a vocabulary list with clear examples.

So yes this course could benefit from more detail time to time

Do not be fooled by the course description. You do need to know some basics before attempting the course. Be prepared to look a lot of things up independently or purchase the "optional" text book. There is virtually no moderator in this course and the instructor does not grade or comment on the discussions. Basically he is reading you PowerPoint slides and adding very little to the lesson by watching and listening to him do so. Your grades are based on what your peers (who are also trying to learn) think or interpret the correct answer to be based on their limited knowledge and discretion. I would not recommend this course for someone wishing to learn SQL as it is not the main focus, it is only a small part of the lessons.

I found the content was great but the style of lectures were a bit too robotic and not conversational. This didn't help the learning process. Also, the course admin might consider explaining 'On' 'And' 'Where' 'TIMESTAMP', 'DateDiff' more than what was provided.

Avoid this course like the plague. Terribly taught, no support, problems only vaguely related to the course material, and designed to force you to buy the manual for the course. The next classes in the specialization get even worse, with the student forums full of students who can't get any help though the grueling process of installing Oracle, Pentaho, etc. on a personal laptop. I was fortunate to have experience with the tools, would have never managed to finish the course just based on the terribly taught material.

Severe lack of support (zero) from the professor or TAs. Some wrong solutions were provided for assigments but were never addressed or acknowledged that it will be fixed. Some assignment files are not Mac friendly or is just not viewable by all students (I can't tell). Materials are quite good but grading is subject to broad interpretations and there is no human to provide guidance on what are the best practices. To think that I paid for the specialisation in order to take the graded assignment AND I have to do the grading BUT I do not receive support? This is ridiculous. I will have to think three times before I pay for a Coursera course in the future. Never again. I will not recommend this to others.

Assignments are very inaccurate. Mess with table and field names. Oracle VM is very heavy and slow to use on regular laptop.

Well structured and gre

Very interesting course, reexplaining the basics in details. Great content too!

Though content is good slides and delivery style could be better. More comparison with latest technologies can be provided. Need for more interactive quizzes so as to make it more relevant to fast-changing database world.

One of the best introduction to Databases courses I came upon (and I looked at many....:)