This course is about applying what you learn on a free form project.. but you should use Foursquare API which it might be challenging little bit to deal with..

There are some errors in the instructions labs, in forums is the way you can get help, but it it necessary to modify the code in the examples.

Good practical lesson. However the learning curve is too steep compare to the other courses in this certificate.

Great capstone project. But forced to do the same project. It would be better to get more choices of projects.

I didn't like that we had to use Foursquare — I could not come up with anything interesting.

The difficulty could be increased and the scope of topics covered could be wider.

The instructor of the capstone saved this specialization for me.

I did not find the project relevant to the rest of the course

It is difficult. I will like more support from the teachers.

Broken links in samples and csv data files.

some lab codes cannot run smoothly

very vague with the information

It is good for beginners.

Hardness Level High

really difficult

I can say overall it's a good program. However by reviewing the first few courses, you will get a headache, but the rest courses are very useful. Some parts are really useless for a data scientist and are more useful for programmers, which I recommend you do not put a lot of time on them and skip them as much as you can.

Apart from the material, I think this certificate is really useful for you to get a job. But, if you just want to learn new concepts in data science and do not need a certificate, I recommend you to take other courses other than IBM. There are very good courses on @linkedin Learning.

In this program, IBM pushes you to work only on its platforms which is really annoying and I think this a considerable drawback of this program.

If you spend at least 4-5 hours a day, you'll be able to complete it in 2 months. The subscription is monthly and it's around $50 CAD and you can unsubscribe whenever you want.

I enjoyed working on an open ended project, which was not the case in the remaining 8 courses in this specialisation. I was completely unprepared for some common challenges with a real life dataset and it took me a hard time to address them. On the other hand, it is hideous that only one person reviews your assignment and there are absolutely no requirements regarding the accuracy of the results. I mean who would accept a statistical model with the lowest possible accuracy in your new dream job? Anyhow, the only reason why I kept improving my project is just to show it to my potential future employer and not because of the requirements. The other funny thing is the cavalcade of "Please review my assignment" threads in the discussion forums, which makes it impossible to have a meaningful discussion there. In conclusion, I did other courses on Coursera, but this one had a far lower quality than those.

On one hand there is some encouragement to experiment and come up with an interesting problem and I actually took some time to come up with something non-trivial before starting. But practically, there is no need to -- you can just take the example notebook from one of the prior weeks and change the city. The evaluation doesn't really reward you for doing something original or extra.

Sadly, the certificate of the specialization as a whole is worthless.

I hoped this course would be more complex but it mostly consist of Foursquare API requests. I had to focus how to fit other datasets in addition to Foursquare data to find something interesting but instead of using fancy algorithms and testing them I had to focus on data and it was really time consuming, I spent 2x more time on each assignment. Whole IBM DS path was great but final course was a big disappointment.

Issues with the lab sessions and untimely responses from the staff hindered my learning. Also, the students did not respond to my questions in the discussion forums, they seem to only be about themselves and having people grade their assignments.

It would have been better if the assignment were split on previous courses. IMHO, this course was way longer than the other courses of the specialization

Many errors in the lab and some code were not properly explained. The quality of this module was not as good as the others.

One of the worst mooc ever, content outdated, lessons not real life, and absolute lack of feedback on final assignment

LABs in this course had quite a lot of bugs which costed me a lot of time and nerves.

Massive issues with Labs not working; parts of segments too superficiel explained