Avis et commentaires pour d'étudiants pour Big Data Analysis with Scala and Spark par École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Relatively decent video lectures, if not that blurry which makes text hard to read. Accompanied with awful practice lessons: - code templates are written with little to no style, even file reading is done in 3 different ways in all 3 lessons; - grader output is very confusing and almost useless; - unit tests, very useful to avoid some common caveats, were present in the first lesson, disappear completely in the last one.

Probably following spark's programming guide is better time investment, even if it misses some "humanity" of video lectures

How to execute assignments and weekly work is not properly described in assignment task, it took lot's of time to understand how to execute the project and which software with what configuration is needed. This course is good to learn but submitting assignments is very much difficult. This course can become awesome if the proper guidance is provided for submitting tasks and if demo available how to execute the same.

So many mistakes in the slides. Coding exercises are so hard to comprehend, it's tough to know what you are trying to achieve. I have already done a course in spark, this was supposed to be just refresher, but now I'm just confused...

Course material was pretty good, but the lectures were hard to watch. Lots of editing problems, and blurring on the text (gave me a headache several times). Would rate higher if the videos were improved.

not good teacher lessons

Slow videos repeating several times the same thing (not a pedagogical / "good to fix an idea" kind of repetition), which makes them hard to follow.

However the worst are the exercises: the first time after 3-4 other Coursera Scala related courses where I have to actively check the forums for minute details about what is expected / implied for the solutions to pass the grading.

Things like what to do when updating the kmeans and you have duplicates, subtle differences between average and mean, etc. ...

In all other courses the expectation of the exercises were sufficiently clear and straight forward that I never had to check the forums to solve them.

Also, the code style of the exercises is literally an anti-pattern in idiomatic Scala, against everything learnt in the previous Scala courses: "var" all over the place, low level loops like in C or Java, etc. ...

I don't know what happened but it seems they had technical or some other problem while preparing this course. Some assignments were more oriented to solving marginal problems then using Spark and distributed and parallel computing. And that is really annoying. Previous 3 courses were great, maybe this one will improve.

I can't give more than one star since the exercises contain too many mistakes, which are thoroughly discussed in the forums, have been acknowledged by the staff, and could be fixed in no time. As for the content I think it provides a good first overview.

good lectures another case of lectures not matching the assignment in terms of what you should pick up. inadequate resources and not enough depth on actual transformations and methods.

The assignments are very confusing and unexplained. They do not take long to reply to the forum.

Assignments don't work properly

The course is too basic.