The course can be summarized as: "OK, here are some tools that can be used: now read the documentation, Stack Overflow and some papers that we give you links to". Each week there are just few videos. What I expect from a Course are baby steps and clear guidance about good practices. Of course you can learn it all from the Internet - I am taking a Course to get something I will not easily find elsewhere: a good teacher who will guide me through optimal approaches.

The grading by peers system coupled with the unlocking next week lesson is really aweful. I can't change to previous session event though I worked through the first lesson fast. Everyone has the same issue on the forum but nobody dares to reply. We get no help nor assitance from the platform. This course is purely money stealing. Run away from this course as soon as possible.

I don't think the tutorials walk us through what we are supposed to do. I find myself on youtube watching free tutorials on the very subjects I am paying to learn.

The lectures are overloaded with too much information, and the concepts are presented in a complicated way. I wish the courses in this specialization were self sufficient. It just does not feel like I am getting proficient at any of this even though I can get the assignments done on my own. there should be ample practice exercises with the aim of burning the syntaxes and concepts to memory which is usually not the case. This eventually leads to half hearted learning where students are expected to do every thing on there own. I am disappointed. The course can be improved by going deep into the concepts and providing additional resources for students to explore.

This is an interesting course, but the professor really does not spend enough time teaching the topic. It's like as if he expects that giving us a very high level overview on a subject (e.g., "These are the principles of beauty to follow when making a chart!"), followed by 1-2 very specific cases ("here's how to build a scatterplot!") is enough. We're then expected to teach ourselves in order to be able to turn in assignments. I understand that a core skill of any programmer is the capacity to search for code snippets online as well as ask questions to the community, but for an introductory course on Matplotlib, I'd expect more teaching of the subject matter.

assignments are unclear and provide few explicit resources for users less familiar with statistics. crucial topics are not discussed and we are instead told to go google them for ourselves, which i could have done without paying for a course.

Cant submit for two weeks but billed monthly, this is bogus.

Not very good instructions. The Assignments required just self learning online via other video tutorials/documentation....which defeats the purpose of taking an online course

The instructor just read a text without any interest and passion.

Peer review of assignment is very time sensitive. I don't feel it useful.

Very unresponsible professor. No passion at all!!!!! Did not explain the fundamental concept well. As a result, I do not think I have a deep understangin at all. I spend most my time google in order to finish my assignments.

I give him the second star only because I the way he designed those challenging assignments. He should include some skill needed to finish the assignments.

Didn't like peer grading as it introduces delays in grade and peers don't have competency to judge my work.

Also, the course should be more focused on technical matters. I really would love on the completion of the course to be guru in matplotlib (or some other plot utility) and know by hand all the tricks and methods the data can be plotted.

I registered to the whole specialization mainly to take the first three courses. I got stuck in the second (this one about data visualisation) because a file I need for assignment in week 2 is missing. There are many complaints in the forum from those affected (the file is supposed to contain weather data around your location, and it seems to affect some of us in Europe). I jumped to course 3.

I'm very happy with courses 1 and 3, but this one is extremely bad, with poor material, confusing data and wrong instructions. On top of that, there is no one in the forums to answer questions or fix the errors. I finished courses 1 and 2 (those are great, really) and I will drop this specialisation right now leaving this course unfinished.

The course takes into account the theoretical approach when creating charts which is something I have never thought of! And I don't think you'll find instructors that will go that deep into theory instead of programming.

To be honest, I don't believe that charting needs any programming skills at all, it is similar to creating front-end apps, so I think their focus (a week is dedicated for it) on the theory was a great choice.

This course makes you give up on data science and MOOCs.

Seriously, the content is poorly presented he keeps on speaking , telling 2-3 lines about a function and so on.

I highly recommend stay away from this pathetic specialization.

The only advantage are the assignments and the certificate. But there are better alternatives for information and learning matierals for pandas or matplotlib on youtube or so one. But this course isnt 50 bucks worth it.

Well to be honest youtube videos are quite informative than this. Opting out from this course.

very much disappointed.so much less content than the first one and it is not self-contained. A lot of things left unexplained and kind of assumed that you knew a lot about python already. I literally took another course in python before finishing up this one.

Ideally, would be 2 1/2 stars if that was possible. Again, like Course 1 in the series, the time required is VERY underestimated, especially since the course is little more than a series of exercises that require extensive external research to learn how to complete. The instructor seems more interested in this subject matter than the first course, but the discussions are such high-level overview, much pouring through Stack Overflow is needed just to learn the topics. The best pieces, as in Course 1, are the extra reading that one might never otherwise be pointed towards, but other than those, a $10 web course that simply gave exercises and pointed to Google searches and Stack Overflow to learn the detailed material would accomplish 80+% of what this course does. And many find the assignments confusing which adds time or results in the wrong work product (some of that I believe is especially true for non-native language speakers) - lots of comments to that effect in the forums. Students grade each others' work product, and it is clear from doing so there are many interpretations of the exercises.

And, some students doing the evaluation of others are clearly not qualified to do so - if one does not really understand basic Python or statistics, they should not be indicating the calculations are wrong... And with three reviews required - it seems the grader uses the lowest grade of the three. If 2 reviewers give full marks, and another gives a 0, the 0 is what is recorded. This is especially annoying in tandem with the lack of value in the instruction - just getting some assignments from off the web and forcing yourself to do them would be far more satisfying.

I don't see continuing with the Michigan courses beyond this point - there are better options.

A fundamental issue after this course is that it still takes me hours to prepare an appealing data visualization using what I learned here whereas with Excel it takes me minutes to draw and pretty a graph. So the course doesn't fulfill the practicality criterion yet.

I feel like this course is bad. Since it basically tell us to search google for everything.

I really dislike the peer-graded assignments

Too much of the course is unstructured

I dislike being assigned a region and topic for the final project

I would prefer to dive less into interactivity and focus more on practicing essential plotting skills over and over again.

Too few lectures with detailed explanations of the functionality of matplotlib.

instructor advice is primarily to 'use stack overflow'.

This course was not nearly as valuable to me as the first course in the series. It breezed through a bunch of different plot types without explaining in enough detail what they would be used for or when you should choose to use them. At the same time, it also didn't provide enough clear examples of how to do basic things in matplotlib, which seems to me to be a very non-intuitive thing with poor documentation. I found the first assignment to be very difficult.