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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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I would give this course 4.5 stars if I could. It is a great course and I feel like I really grasped the basics of GIS and using ArcMap after I completed it. The only reason that I gave it 4 stars is that it would be nice if there were an intro course like this that was a little more geared towards people who already have some basic knowledge of SQL and relational databases so that the course could move a little faster.

I found a number of the lessons were light on content, but I have guilty knowledge having used ArcMap on and off for the past few years. A lot of the meat of this course is replicated in similar or only slightly more detail in the follow-on class in the specialization. If you have experience with GIS or Arc I would strongly recommend skipping this class and moving directly to GIS Data Formats, Design and Quality.

I really liked the instructor and his style, and the course was layout well. But pay attention in the lectures and do the assignments. I'm not giving 5-stars because I feel that a little more lecture time should have been dedicated to using ArcMap to do spatial joins, as well as having a few more examples, each with different end-goals for the joined columns.

But the course is very good, and I'm glad I took it.

I enjoyed this course and thought it was a great intro to GIS. Instructions and videos were thorough and I feel like I have the tools I need to move on to the next course. Sometimes it felt like there was less focus on more challenging topics (like spatial joins) and more on topics like exporting documents. This is an intro course though so I understand we were trying to cover a lot at a basic level.

Contains a lot of great content through videos and demonstrations that are easy to follow and in depth enough to understand the concepts. Would be great if there was a way to contact the professor or someone within Coursera to help with technical issues, as I ran into quite a few of those along the way and did not have anyone to reach out to (not a problem with the actual course, just the courser

This course is not lying about being fundamental, and it's a good thing! I was struggling to find a course to start GIS, and I am genuinely relieved to have found this specialization. Although I couldn't give a full star because of it not using ArcGIS Pro, but this course splendidly covers what is essential to start with GIS.

Thank you very much for Nick Santos and team to make this available!

I found the course tutorials and materials really good and clear. I found achieving what I wanted on ARC GIS much harder than I thought it would be, so it was re-assuring where they indicated that people would re-watch the tutorials more than once (Can't tell you how many times I had to watch them to get some elements of the course!!). But encouraged to go on and do the next one.