Practical Predictive Analytics: Models and Methods

This course is quite outdated. I didn't learn much beyond what I already knew before I started. The Spark courses from edX are way better than these. Hopefully "Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark" from the "École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne" (also from Coursera) is good (I know their Scala courses, which are taught by Martin Odersky, are quite good).

There are very few quizzes between lectures and the assignments are not very challenging.

Many of the videos, specially the ones at the end were extremely rushed over. They serve more as a review if you know the subject, otherwise I don't think most people will get much from them.

The audio isn't very good for most of the lectures, many having an very annoying chirping sound (from when you leave an old flip phone near a computer... "teh-teh-teh teh-teh-teh teh-teh-teh teh-tehhhhhh....". Gosh, I haven't heard this sound in maybe over five years...).

The Kaggle competition at the end of the course can be fun if you do the hard work, but you don't need to put much of an effort to pass. I know that the submissions I peer reviewed were quite poor, but the grading criteria that we need to follow as reviewers is quite vague and not very thorough. You also run the risk of getting a lesser grade than you deserve because your reviewer is incompetent, which is a bummer... At the moment the course has very few people taking it (the same people I peer reviewed, also reviewed me, which leads to me to believe that maybe only 3 or 4 people were taking this course during the November 2016 iteration).