Could anybody say how these compare to Andrew Ng's ml-class?
I'm almost through ml-class and I'm wondering, whether these courses add much.
Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses
#22I completed the first two courses in the first four-week block and am currently taking the third course. Mr. Heaton's review provides a really good summary of what to expect. Overall, I'm also happy with the course. I was expecting a little more degree of difficulty and a little higher workload than what I've run into so far. If you're an experienced developer with a Github account, the first course can be completed…
Same here. The first three were a good start. It was a little annoying that there is zero feedback on the peer assessments other than the grade. The third class starts off slow but by he last week is at about the same level as the R Programming course. My biggest complaint ( which applies to all of these courses) is that the lectures are just narrated PowerPoint presentations. Are all moocs like that? I'm not expecting polished videos at the same level as Kahn Academy but these lectures are just a small step up from fading the slides myself.
Now I'm taking the next three. They are a good continuation that picks up where the first three left off. I was looking forward to the Statstical Inference class. It has been almost 10 years since I took intro to stats in college. For someone without any stats background this course will really step up the difficulty. I was even more disappointed with the lectures on the stats cours. The yellow highlighting as he reads each line on the slide is extremely distracting. But the content is exactly what I was hoping for.
I've done a little hacking with R for data heavy analysis at work when excel couldn't handle the data. I'm really glad to be taking advantage of this opportunity to get more experience with it in these course. My day job is implementing the 'production' side of this kind of data processing with java and hadoop in the healthcare space. Hopefully this specialization will help me better communicate with our clinical/science teams.
Re: Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses
#23I completed the first two courses in the first four-week block and am currently taking the third course. Mr. Heaton's review provides a really good summary of what to expect. Overall, I'm also happy with the course. I was expecting a little more degree of difficulty and a little higher workload than what I've run into so far. If you're an experienced developer with a Github account, the first course can be completed…
I find it amazing how many complaints there are on the official forums form these classes. I'm not sure what people were expecting. But equivalent material is available online for people with 2000-4000 dollar price tags.
These classes will always amount to what people can make of them. My expectation from this isn't to become a data scientist, it's simply to improve from where I current am. After I've taken a few more of these I'll try some Kaggle.
My only issue so far has been the quality of lectures in the Inference Class, but even then it's likely worth the time and money invested.
Re: Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses
#24I completed the first two courses in the first four-week block and am currently taking the third course. Mr. Heaton's review provides a really good summary of what to expect. Overall, I'm also happy with the course. I was expecting a little more degree of difficulty and a little higher workload than what I've run into so far. If you're an experienced developer with a Github account, the first course can be completed…
My interest was piqued by this article, but upon initial investigation, I'm having trouble stomaching putting $50 toward learning how to use github... Any reason I shouldn't just skip ahead?
Re: Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses
#25To employers out there, how much does the fact that a candidate completed a Coursera/Udacity course factor into your decision to hire him? Does it matter if he paid for the certificate?
Completing does not factor into hiring decision. A paid certificate does not factor in, either. In almost all cases, decision to hire is based on:
1) Whether we like the person (i.e., can we get along with him for months, years, etc.)
2) Is the person honest?
3) Was this person recommended, and do your views align with the recommender's?
Re: Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses
#26I completed the first two courses in the first four-week block and am currently taking the third course. Mr. Heaton's review provides a really good summary of what to expect. Overall, I'm also happy with the course. I was expecting a little more degree of difficulty and a little higher workload than what I've run into so far. If you're an experienced developer with a Github account, the first course can be completed…
My interest was piqued by this article, but upon initial investigation, I'm having trouble stomaching putting $50 toward learning how to use github... Any reason I shouldn't just skip ahead?
The $50 is an optional fee for the Signature Track. If you pay for this track, Coursera adds some extra checks to validate your identity and issues you a "Verified" certificate.
You can still take all of the courses for free and get a certificate, but Coursera won't validate that you actually did the coursework.
I'm guessing you could pick and choose to pay for only certain classes, but you have to pay for all of them to earn the overall "Specialization" certificate.
See the following url for details: https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1?utm...
Re: Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses
#27I think we are doing the specialization at the same time.
As an open source maintainer I can say that “question asking etiquette” is NOT common knowledge.
I don't have any problem with having that as a credit earning question. But I hated it when it carried 20-25% of the credit in one of the quizzes. This course could have asked more questions in the quiz to test its students more.
Re: Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses
#28Could anybody say how these compare to Andrew Ng's ml-class? I'm almost through ml-class and I'm wondering, whether these courses add much.
Andrew Ng's class has hours and hours of content each week and it is pretty thorough (I am just auditing, don't have much knowledge).
I feel that Data Scienctist Toolkit was a slacker course, it could have covered more topics or tested the students more. Five questions in each quiz and four such quizzes and you are done.
These courses are morale boosters, you can earn a certificate in four weeks and that keeps some motivated.
I like the concept of five late days for the whole course, lets you stay on track despite one's busy schedule.
Re: Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The certificate does not matter to me, but completing the course is a bonus if the candidate mentions it. It demonstrates to me the ability to affect self-improvement.
I'm about to finish the ML course (after 3 tries.) And essentially you have to battle the huge amount of boredom and keep doing it week after week without stop. Just yesterday I took a quiz without even watching the lecture or anything: scored 4.5/5. Proceeded to finish the programming assignment, again without bothering with the lecture, 100/100. Not to say I won't watch the lecture later, I want to make sure I know…
It is amazing how under-valued persistence is in engineering. It is the trait that I find the most exciting to discover in any candidate.