The material of the fourth week is quite dense, this could be split over two weeks (including splitting it into two exercises). The exercise of the fourth week is quite a dissatisfying experience, there is too little detail in the error messages about what failed for students to improve their solution.

It felt like the course material skipped over a great deal of syntax and how-to. It was useful for concepts; but I found that I had to dig a great deal to be able to complete the assignments and that there is a lot of folklore in stackOverflow that potentially send you in a wrong direction.

Explanations are OK and it's a good investment. However, I'm mixed about the courses: the teacher is speaking really fast with slides full of text. It's sometime hard to keep my concentration (compared to previous courses of the specialization). Still, I would recommend this course.

The assignments are not really well prepared - there is tests provided which is really needed for big amount of data - sometimes it really hard to find a bug. If you tell me that this is my problem to right tests - I'll tell you that I've paid money for that.

Lectures are great. Explanation are very clear. Assignment was having issue like incorrect and/or vague reporting which made them needlessly painfull. I'm quite sure that the next iteration of this course can get a 5 star rating, but for now, it's only 3.

The lectures are really great with vivid and easy-to-follow explanations on complex topics.

However, the exercises don't seem to match the lectures very well and may confuse you. I would prefer to apply the things I learned in the lectures.

In the assignments, I had the feeling that the goal was more "guess what they want" than "write it correctly using what you have learnt". Stating more clearly the requirements and improving error messages from the grader may help.

Instructor was good and knew what she was talking about. The assignments were also good, but the grading was weird. Spent a lot of time try to figure out the unwritten requirements that would make Coursera's tests pass.

I guess it's a goo introduction course into Apache Spark. Meantime I would expect deeper dive into optimizations and algorithms.

Pretty good, but one of the assignments was poorly set up. Some of the provided code was broken and it was very hard to debug.

Too entry-level after the first two much more challenging courses by M. Odersky.

course needs to be updated

a let down and not up to par with other courses in the series.

Huge amount of time is wasted bsically repeating that the API is close to scala collections'. The huge amout of time is wasted again on very simple dataframe APIs including several slides presenting the show() function. Allow me to repeat : several slides presenting the show() function.

Finally the assignments are unimaginative and mechanical. The desciption is really confuse and most of the time is spend trying to chase small differences away to please the grader.

The sole part of the course that seemed interesting was the shuffling one, that was unfourtunately ignored on the assignments

Not related to the course but to spark: What utter mess are dataframes and datasets filled with boilerplate type conversions and runtime erros. I shy away in disgust form this untyped IDE-unfriendly monstruosity.

Relatively decent video lectures, if not that blurry which makes text hard to read. Accompanied with awful practice lessons: - code templates are written with little to no style, even file reading is done in 3 different ways in all 3 lessons; - grader output is very confusing and almost useless; - unit tests, very useful to avoid some common caveats, were present in the first lesson, disappear completely in the last one.

Probably following spark's programming guide is better time investment, even if it misses some "humanity" of video lectures

How to execute assignments and weekly work is not properly described in assignment task, it took lot's of time to understand how to execute the project and which software with what configuration is needed. This course is good to learn but submitting assignments is very much difficult. This course can become awesome if the proper guidance is provided for submitting tasks and if demo available how to execute the same.

So many mistakes in the slides. Coding exercises are so hard to comprehend, it's tough to know what you are trying to achieve. I have already done a course in spark, this was supposed to be just refresher, but now I'm just confused...

Course material was pretty good, but the lectures were hard to watch. Lots of editing problems, and blurring on the text (gave me a headache several times). Would rate higher if the videos were improved.

Slow videos repeating several times the same thing (not a pedagogical / "good to fix an idea" kind of repetition), which makes them hard to follow.

However the worst are the exercises: the first time after 3-4 other Coursera Scala related courses where I have to actively check the forums for minute details about what is expected / implied for the solutions to pass the grading.

Things like what to do when updating the kmeans and you have duplicates, subtle differences between average and mean, etc. ...

In all other courses the expectation of the exercises were sufficiently clear and straight forward that I never had to check the forums to solve them.

Also, the code style of the exercises is literally an anti-pattern in idiomatic Scala, against everything learnt in the previous Scala courses: "var" all over the place, low level loops like in C or Java, etc. ...

I don't know what happened but it seems they had technical or some other problem while preparing this course. Some assignments were more oriented to solving marginal problems then using Spark and distributed and parallel computing. And that is really annoying. Previous 3 courses were great, maybe this one will improve.

The assignments are very confusing and unexplained. They do not take long to reply to the forum.

Assignments don't work properly

The course is too basic.