The first course of the specialization is very simple. The specialization was announced to be on an intermediate level but at the same time, you need to spend money on a very basic course with swirl assignments pretty much copying the course content. The good thing is that it includes very modern approaches to data analysis and new packages. The second course is much better, nevertheless.

I found the final project very very difficult as weeks 1 to 3 did not cover sufficient practice of the libraries which were to be used. That having been said, the project was achievable when you spent 20 hours on it. I posted several questions to the forum and received no answers.

This was a nice introduction to R for someone who has had previous programming experience. However, many of the lessons had simple grammatical errors in them, which is just unprofessional. Many of the swirl lessons were just the online material repeated, so reading the lessons then doing the swirl lesson was massive repetition. Also, many of the swirl "lessons" were merely "Type this in and see what happens!" which doesn't really teach anything. Finally, the final quiz material had spaces in the column headings which was fixable but added a level of monotony and inconvenience that was not needed.

Swirl is a great idea, but each section is submitted independently of the others. You have to complete all sections in one sitting if you plan to submit electronically. I had to redo 8 of the 9 sections in week 1 for this reason.

Content-wise, the quiz in week four is significantly more difficult than the other assignments and I felt a little underprepared.

Mostly good, but 2-year-old errors in a swirl assignment wasted more than a day's work

I had to drop out because of technical issues. A week 2 issue that is documented in the bulletin board had no clear resolution. After several months of trying to figure out the issue for weeks, I determined that the course wasn't worth extra time and money being spent.