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Excellent general introduction to the fundamentals of GIS. The course instructor gives clear explanations and is quite easy to listen to and follow. Every lesson contains everything for a foundational knowledge of the particular topic or skill, without overloading or dragging on for too long. The lecturer is also careful to preface anything that will be gone into in a later lesson, so you never feel concerned if you see all the options available but only delve into a few.

The content is well structured and the course follows an easy pace, without both too much hand holding or leaving you wondering where to go next. Having done GIS before in university, I found this was an excellent refresher to prepare me for the rest of the specialization, but that someone with relatively little knowledge could also excel.

My only critical points are that there is occasionally the odd line which you need to listen to a few times, due to jargon or the odd phrase or stutter in the flow of the lesson, but overall I found it very easy to follow. Also in the reviewed assignment, the items which would be included in the marking rubric were scattered in the explanation document, so I missed them before my initial upload.

I enjoyed this course and was glad I did it. The material was explained clearly and the subject was covered in the right amount of detail.

I felt there are a couple of areas with room for improvement.

1. With the "Summarise this lesson" type sections, whilst this seems like a good learning tool, it just a shame it clutters up the same discussion space as technical questions. It makes it hard to scroll through and look for solutions to common problems, or help othes, as they get buried by the volumes of lesson summaries. Also I suspect it crowds out the space from getting help from the instructors, I didn't see much instructor involvement in the forum.

2. I found the early stage quite hard going just because of housekeeping issues with how to manage .mpk files, file structure and where to store the various file types. I realise some of this was covered in week 4, but it would still have been very helpful to have a bit of a talk or a document on opening the mpk files, managing things like home directories, default directories, linked folders, version control etc. Seems to me quite a fundamental part of using arcGIS that needs some good discipline.

Looking forward to the next course.

Nick is an excellent professor. He explains concepts in a straightforward, easy to understand way. It's awesome that we get a year of the student version of ArcMap to play around in. The assignments were helpful and instructions were easy to follow. I'm looking forward to learning more about how to aggregate data and build maps in future courses. I will say though that there were some difficulties on the tech side doing this course. For one, I have a Mac so I had to purchase and install Windows for Mac since ArcMap only runs on Windows. So that took some time and I think ~$150. Second, the link they initially send to you to install ArcMap doesn't come in the right format (It needs to be in a .txt format). My husband (who's a coder) had to help me convert it to the correct format so I could actually install the software I needed. Questions related to technical problems on the discussion boards don't seem to be answered promptly (or sometimes at all). If not for these issues, I'd give the course 5 stars.

The course is excellent and I have no words to thank you for the guiding level of detail, breakdown of the basics, provided throughout. However, I recommend to increase the number of peer reviews of our assignments to 3 or 4 reviewers, and discard the outliers. I personally disagree with one my graders and posted a comment mentioning his grading deficiency but received the downgrading nonetheless. It's unfair after so much effort to be stuck with an unfair downgrading. There should be a quality control that allows prevention or revision of grader's shortcomings. In my specific case as a reviewer, I downgraded the same person above for the opposite reason he downgraded me, but I explained the reasons in the comments section. He evaluated my work hastily based on what he applied in his assignment instead of following directions. I hope you'll read my comments and provide feedback.

The professor is wonderful; he explains everything in a way that's easy to understand yet is not dumbed down. I learned a great deal in this course and I'm looking forward to the next one. I would have given 5 stars but for 2 reasons:

(1) The professor either does not read the forums or just does not respond to questions, so there needs to be a way to contact him with questions. We cannot rely solely on our peers to help with any issues we have, as they are still learning, just as I am.

(​2) The grade for the final project is based on peer review. I considering dropping another star and rating this course as 3 stars due to this. What is the point of doing a project where the only feedback comes from other students who are at the same level as I am? I expected more from a UC Davis course; specifically, that I would receive some kind of feedback from a professional.

Great course with engaging material and enthusiastic and experienced instruction. The materials, lectures, assignments, extras, links, etc. were excellent. Only two negative aspects occurred. The first was the initial lack of materials with which to follow the instructors as they went through various processes in ArcMap in their lectures. However, this was remedied quickly and materials were provided. The second was the instructional material for the week 2 assignment, which lacked the step-by-step detail and polish of the assignments from other weeks. This may have been due to the course being new and somewhat unrefined. Overall, the course was extremely helpful and well worth the time and money. I intend to continue on and complete the entire specialization.

The course content was great and I learned a lot! The assignments provided a good introduction to hand-on GIS work, and the lectures explained things in an easy-to-understand way. However, some of the material (e.g., the video about how to get your ArcGIS license) was out of date. There was also an issue with one of the assignments involving a graded external tool that caused a lot of stress for many students (the assignment refused to mark itself as 'complete' even after completing the task, preventing students from completing the course and necessitating a lot of back-and-forth with the Coursera suport team), and the course staff didn't appear to be monitoring the discussion forums to address this issue.

I really liked the structure of the class and it's flexibility. I liked that there were assignments with step by step instructions that were not required. This allowed for the opportunity to practice new tools, but without the stress of grading. The reason I am only giving a four star rating is because the grading system for the final assignment. I liked the quiz section that you needed to enter attribute data into, but did not like the peer review system. There is so much variation between people. I literally received 100% from one individual and 0% from the other with no feedback to as why they graded the way that they did.

Good, easy to understand course overall, but I don't feel like I really learned how to use the software until the final project where I had to figure out how to get the result I wanted on my own. That being said, I think the videos and the optional assignments were good for giving me an idea of how to get to my final result. I do wish there were additional small assignments in the class where you had to figure things out on your own rather than being walked through the process step-by-step.

Great course which covers a wide range of GIS applications and very thorough assignments along the way. Quizzes also have detailed feedback to enable you to check your progress. However personally I would have preferred more explanation about why something is done or the underlying concepts. I still feel like I have quite a shallow understanding of GIS. Also very focused on the professor's interest - hydrology in California. Nevertheless I still really enjoyed the course and learnt a lot.

The course is great in the aspect of practice and hand on experience ! I liked the most how the instructor focused on doing examples in the videos and encouraging us to try them out on our own. Not to mention the practice assignments and the extra reading to additional practice.

The course also was successful in engaging the learners in discussion forums and lesson summaries.

I think its the perfect start to learn GIS and get the initial concept on how to navigate this area of analysis

Great beginners course for GIS for those who are working full time or have other schedules which limit their ability to go to a physical class. The only recommendation I would have is to have a better method to troubleshoot issues (i.e. more teacher or moderator interaction). Since this course has you applying what you learn through video, it can be tough to watch a video and do the work on your own. Otherwise, I learned a lot of great skills that I can now apply to my job!

This course was my first ever from the Coursera community! I really enjoyed learning more about GIS. This was the perfect course, for me, because I needed a course that could help me gain a better understanding about the fundamentals of GIS, as they pertain to using ArcGIS, specifically. The assignments and videos were helpful, and paralleled the material. I am now more confident with ArcGIS, and look forward to taking another course under the specialization in the future.

Great course but I didn't give it the 5 stars becuase for the 2nd assingment, the Cummulative Area table that was required to complete the assignment was not inlcuded with the data, therefore I could not complete this assignment. It seems like other people had that same issue too. I hope they correct this issue or if this was a mistake in my part, I hope they provide a better explanation of where to get this table so future students don't have to skip this assignment too.

I thought that this was a very good introduction to GIS course. However, there were a few times the instructions to course work was vague. But, using the forum and Google, I was able to figure out the practice work. The final project was very challenging. We were asked to do things that were not discussed in the class. It was an assumption that students had knowledge of querying databases. Overall, I will recommend this course to those looking to get started in GIS

Making the online features of ArcGIS mandatory components of the final assignment may pose a barrier to some people. In my case, I am learning ArcGIS for my work and have been using the software on an offline work server (my personal computer could not meet the minimum system requirements for ArcGIS and often crashed). So, I was not able to add the elements like basemap to my maps, which made it a big challenge for me to pass the final assignment.

This course gives a good overview of GIS. It helps in becoming familiar with ArcGIS software and also teaches a lot of fundamentals that can be generally applied to different GIS products as well. But looking at the expenses of using ArcGIS for commercial purposes, it would have been great had there been some sort of additional, optional demonstrations of other products.. For a small-medium business, ArcGIS doesn't seem viable at all.

Thanks, Mr Nick.

This 'Fundamentals of GIS' course is really helpful for me as a beginner. I gain basic knowledge about GIS and learn the basic important regular useable tools of ArcGIS. The final peer graded assignment is really challenging to me and grows more interest for me to learn more and achieve more. I enjoyed it while learning. Thus I failed some of my assignments but I never quit. Never quit.

Thanks, Coursera.

I really enjoyed this course and I learned a lot. My only critique is that most of the lectures were about specific processes and tools in ArcGIS, but they were not necessarily created in such a way that students could follow along in ArcGIS easily. I think it would be easier to learn and remember all of the processes if each lecture were more structured around the student going through the same actions as the lecturer.