Although the course is taught well and covers a lot of ground, it is my opinion that the course content is not relevant to what I and majority of other Scala developers were looking for in terms of parallel programming. The instructor has been upfront in differentiating parallel programming (the objective of this course) from concurrency programming. However, I was more interested in learning about concurrency, especially about Akka actors, etc. I wish there was a course of Akka, which is what most Scala developers use for concurrent applications.

General idea of the course is very good. There are a few things to improve though:

Focus more on intuition behind algorithms rather than formal math

Build a solid foundation that would allow students to develop parallel algorithms themselves.

Practical assignments should focus exactly on this, rather than filling in missing pieces of code that are only tangentially related to the algorithm itself.

It would be helpful if the course provided minimal but solid basics and intuition behind parallel computations. The basics that would allow students to learn more advanced concepts themselves.

In any case, the course has a lot of value and the instructors are awesome.

Plus: Very in-depth lectures, challenging assignments. Minus: The actual parallel code somewhat remains a black-box, assignments sometimes focus more on figuring out the algorithm logic which may not have anything to do with the course. Still I enjoyed it and learned a great deal.

Some of the practical examples are a bit tedious, because the bigger issues you sometimes need to solve seem to be implementing a random algorithm, instead of implementing its parallelization per se. That is, the support classes for parallelizing the algorithms are pre-coded for you, while you at times spend more time figuring out how the algorithm itself needs to be implemented with that rather than coming up with these parallelization semaphores (which I would have considered more interesting, at least). But the content covered is highly relevant and first class (the authors being world-leading experts on the topic), so if you are interested in parallel programming, this is course is a great choice.

First 3 weeks were cool, but the last week was somehow rushed and the assignment did not involve any parallel programming.

The tasks are not well designed for online education

All but the last assignment are interesting. A fair amount of the lectures are also good, even though some of them are too theoretical - the bad lectures are the ones that focus too much into proving mathematical properties, but thankfully there is just a few of those.

The last assignment is considerably larger than the other ones and requires a physics background (or interest to do research on your own). I think they could improve it by approaching the material independently with smaller exercises before applying them again into the larger application that is built as part of the assignment today.

Amazing practice assignments! It was very interesting to solve them.

Nice and complicated

Excelente curso...

Great course. I learned things that I didn't think were possible.

Crisp and to the point. Enjoyed thoroughly

Organised and delivered elegantly.

Programming assignments are somewhat challenging, but it's fun :)

Great course, thank you so much!!!

Course with excellent content, methodology and teacher. It was an extraordinary learning experience

Somewhat difficult course, but good to first learn parallel programming.

The material in the course is not complete, but it's perfect as introductory course in parallel programming.

The course is fairly advanced and you would need to review the materials many times to understand the concept. The assignments are definitely fun and not as straightforward as other courses.

This is one of the most dense and solid courses on Coursera and I really enjoyed tackling it

Good course. The only thing I would suggest to improve is in the Assignments, the error messages are not always sufficient information to recreate the bug that caused the error, so it is hard to correct the bug (since if you don't recreate the bug, you don't find the root cause). On the other hand it's understandable, that giving away too much info from the grader makes it easier to "workaround" the failed test without necessarily providing a good solution. Tricky trade-off.

Anyway, both the lecturers do a very good job of explaining fairly complex stuff in ways that non-computer-science students can understand.

Спасибо! Thank you!

Thanks!

I like the course. I learned some nice ideas for parallel computations, not just Scala specific API.

To polish: sometime lectures and tasks contain many complicated but not significant details. And some important ideas are not emphasized. I had to filter the content carefully.

Cool course