I come from a background of teaching for 18 years, and not in SQL. My biggest criticism for this course is the lack of preparation for the culminating activities. The course saves all the challenging work for the last 2% of the course. Even that would be okay, if you were prepared via practice early on for the rigor at the end. All the assistants and fellow students try their best to help each other in the forums without cheating, but it shouldn't be this way. If so many students are needing so much help in the final part of the course, then that speaks to ineffective and inadequate instruction early in the course.

Teaching is not just knowing the material or being engaging. The real work of an instructor is to create instruction that builds students' knowledge and prepares them for tasks in a logical, methodical progression. This course was like playing on the monkey bars and some light tumbling for 90% of the time, then suddenly being asked to stick a landing in the Olympics off the uneven bars. I exaggerate to make the point of my frustration.

Great for complete beginners.

+) Video tutorials + coding practices in controlled, sandbox environment.

+) No need to install anything. You can complete everything in browser view.

-) Quiz and exam questions are poorly written; they are unclear and unhelpful.

-) Quizzes and exercises are also far an few between. You need more frequent exercises.

-) Nobody will answer your questions. But that's ok. You will still learn the fundamental concepts and you will pass the test.

Overall, this course is good as a very first step in a safe and clean environment. If you want something in a more real environment (say, integrate with Python), you will need to take another course.

The videos contain the material necessary to get a basic understanding for relational databases and sql.

I ended up skipping a lot of parts in the videos because of the extremely slow pace. The lectures also feel very scripted as well as awkward and were not very enjoyable to watch.

The tests were mostly ok, sometimes the tasks were not possible to be solved with the knowledge learned or with the very limited sql-version available (sqlite). It sometimes felt like the creators did not solve them before submitting.

The final assignement is quite the mess. A lot of repetitive work, sometimes the questions plainly dont make a lot of sense. Eg: Is there a correlation between factor a and b? Show by looking at top 10 results for a... not very statistically meaningful!

Instructor seems not to have written or read the script prior to recording - stumbling over her words is distracting and reduces learner comprehension. No way to practice coding with feedback in the module. Practice exercises at the end of the module include no feedback, hints, or examples - it may as well be a test. I stopped after two weeks - I was wasting my time.

The lectures are littered with sloppy errors that haven't been fixed or acknowledged even after multiple people have pointed them out more than a year ago. Some of these errors seriously impede understanding and progress.

The narration is awkward and appears to have been written by someone other than the narrator.

Some of the assignment questions are terribly worded and mentors have provided inconsistent clarification on how to deal with some of these cases.

Many legitimate concerns that have been raised in the forums have not even been acknowledged let alone addressed by staff/mentors.

Nevertheless, the course at the very least does provide a reasonable structure, and the graded quizzes/assignment motivate students to achieve a certain level of mastery.

Poorly designed quiz and final project questions combined with a SQL interface which cannot use some of the commands introduced in the lessons leads to tedious parsing of the questions. But it is short and there appears to be enough students to make the peer review of the final project possible in April 2019. Not recommended.

I dislike being negative about courses, but I really struggled on this one. The lecture videos felt disconnected from the coursework, and it was often unclear what the lectures were supposed to be teaching me. There was very little detail in the lectures themselves, but rather vague bulletpointed lists that the lecturer just read out verbatim.

The assignments were too few and far between, and I seldom got the opportunity to try out the techniques that were mentioned in the lecturers for days or weeks, so when I did I often didn't understand what I was being tested on. In many cases, I found I had to read up on W3 Schools instead to find the correct clauses and syntax. Despite the supposed focus on SQLite, I don't feel we covered using SQLite in enough detail for me to say I would feel familiar with it vs any other environment.

The forums were a long list of questions from confused students with little useful feedback, and the final assignment had questions that couldn't be answered literally, which made the peer-reviewed nature of the marking unpredictable.

I can't recommend this course as it currently stands.

She's a horrible teacher as of explaining code. For the most time, she only shows the input and never mentions the output. And if you google it, most of the codes are from templates online that are not very illustrative. Also, many of the questions in quiz are irrelevant to what she taught, or the things she spent a lot of time on never appeared in the quiz. Terrible experience with this instructor.

Pretty decent introductory course to SQL.

Pros: Quiz and coding assignments are good, overall speaking.

Cons: (1) The instructor usually spends lots of time laying out the learning objective and the background info. (2) Too few examples. (3) Too few coding tests. Ideally, put one quick test after each video for students to get their hands dirty as soon as possible rather than wait till the end of the module. (4) Provide summary pdfs which summarizes the syntax the module covers. (5) Provide answers to the coding questions.

This is not a course. It is a presentation of material. The version of SQLite that is provided does not support the important and flexible functions that SQLite normally supports.

The material covered is very very very basic.

I do not recommend this course as there are more efficient methods of getting an introduction to SQL.

There is virtually no assistance from staff regarding the numerous clarifications necessary to even understand the last assignment (peer-review), and I'm pretty sure we didn't go over correlation and/or regression in the course, let alone hypothesis testing.

I'm pretty sure I won't be able to finish the course at all considering the plethora of uncorrected problems plaguing the course. I recommend that this class be evaluated for quality assurance.

I am not the only student experiencing problems with this assignment. The forums for week 4 are teeming with unanswered questions regarding the assignment and its unclarity.

I recommend contacting UCD and telling them that they really need to solve the problems with the class.

Best,

-CS

Course was informative and a decent foundation, but the lecture delivery was incredibly frustrating. Some concepts were explained very poorly, and I'll have to supplement how parts of the basics are used (e.g. Views, Self Joins, Having, European Date treatment). Often the lecturer tripped over sentences inserting phrases that made no sense, couldn't read words on the screen correctly etc. Also, needed FAR more examples for a couple of the more involved commands. Syntax of code writing changed mid lecture series for one of the weeks, and the practice questions in W2 had completely inconsistent code with what was provided in lectures. This course has potential, but the delivery must be *vastly* improved

This course has really helped with optimizing queries that I work with everyday, enhancing my understanding of RDBMS, joins, analyzing and structuring exactly what you need and yielding those results.

This course is designed with beginners in mind, and it is an excellent introduction to SQL. I intend to further my knowledge of SQL after taking this course. The instructor did a terrific job.

Poorly-taught, poorly-presented. Course materials had too many grammar mistakes and typos; lesson content insufficiently practiced in assignments, some not used at all; subject matter often barely explained, and no consideration given for complexity of topics--all described at same pace, with same scant amount of examples; production rushed and lazy: instructor clearly filmed lectures without sufficient practice--frequent verbal gaffes that could/should have been edited out or avoided in multiple takes.

many of the quiz problems are poorly constructed! We are told after the fact "ohh... we forgot to tell you the value is a string, so you need to fix that field before attempting the min/max we are asking for." Design a better course!!!! Going to EdX SQL class instead which uses the DataCamp back end!

Great course i had a very good learning experience from this course and what i was expecting from this course i got that knowledge and i am very happy to take this course. thank you so much.

Well the examples were very accurate for the course. I liked the final assessment specially it was a very good practice

To improve the technical skills this course mostly helpfull for the sql database.

The course is basically theoretical. There is not any practice during the course except for the quizes and the final project. I had to complement the theory I learned here with another online course that focuses on the practice.

Also, some questions of the final project were not clear enough, while reviewing I found out that people understood different things.

This course was good because it teaches you many keywords that are used for practical application in the world of data science. I definitely feel more confident with SQL after finishing this course.

A nice course to get introduced to writing SQL queries in Data science. Provides hands on exercises that boost confidence. Genuinely appreciate the ease with which SQL topics are covered

The course met my expectations as someone with no real prior knowledge. I now feel much more confident.

The lectures were well structured and the were a good amount of exercises. THe only reason I am giving the course 4-stars is due to the final exercise. Some of the questions were vague/not worded clearly enough. I had to dig through the forum to try to understand the questions.

Overall I would recommend this course!

Well crafted course for a beginner. You dont need any prior knowledge of programming or other languages like C. The course pushes you to read about SQL from other sources as well. The quizzes are also designed well for enhanced learning. The final assignment was also interesting as it requires you to work like a data scientist, design your own problem and solve it. Final word: Go for this course if you're looking for a basic introduction to SQL.

Better than I hoped for. I learned everything I needed in order to feel competent in the basics of SQL. It was just the right amount of instruction and challenge, perfect for a beginner like me.