Covers the basics

very basic

Having completed the assignment after many hours of trial & error; here are some suggestions for improving the class for future sessions.

Increase the length and depth of the lectures so that more of the materials needed for the assignment are covered.

For each week, have an optional programming exercise (not graded) but with a model answer (with explanations of why) so that students have a concrete example on which to practice key concepts on.

As classes & structs are very important to completing the assignment (instead of just including the SWIFT manual chapter on classes & structs in the Follow Up Reading), include an actual lecture about this topic.

Improve the description of the assignment to be completed. Be specific about what is required (e.g.; what does interface mean? Is is a User interface or is just a specified variable which can be changed in the program code? What do you mean by order of applying filters? Do you mean a variable which lets you decide order of filters and executes the filters accordingly or does the ability to manually rearranging the order of the calling of functions in the code suffice?)

Improve the alignment between the assignment and the review criteria. The assignment asks for FIVE filters but there is no matching criterion in the review criteria. Based on the current review criteria, creating two filters would suffice to demonstrate ability to order and get full points for varying intensity for more than 1 filter.

I hope the remainder of the modules are better otherwise I will be extremely disappointed !

This course was little more than a haphazard, ambling preview of a tiny bit of Swift. There was some useful content in the class but the organization was poor and there was almost no evidence of course design or use of the teaching techniques I expected to see from a major university. The best section of the course was week 5, where they syntax of Objective-C and Swift were superficially compared. That section did give some clear opinions on why Swift should be chosen over Objective-C for new development. The other sections just contained too many confusing, unrehearsed diversions into esoteric topics to be of much use. I ended getting more out of the Apple documentation on Swift than I did from this class.

However, the instructors have received ample feedback of this nature and they do seem genuinely concerned with improving the course. Assuming that they will make major improvements for the next round and noting that Coursera's infrastructure is excellent, don't be scared to take the class. The email reminders from Coursera about assignments, etc... kept me on track and kept me in the class.

I am sure if you are familiar with the content or an expert programmer looking for an overview of a new language then this would be perfect but you do need to understand swift before starting this introduction to swift.

The lessons felt very unstructured, unplanned and ad hoc almost like the people presenting didn't know they were being recorded, this meant that the examples given were contrived without consideration to the suitability to present the concept succinctly and would require anyone but an existing swift programmer needing to carry out additional reading which rather defeats the purpose of an "introduction to..." course.

A little scripting and lesson planning and preparation of content would have made the difference between this excellently produced and edited course being awkward and an effort to attend into a really useful reference for beginers of swift programming.

To summarise, the obviously expert technical knowledge of the speakers and the quality of the editing are let down by rushed lesson content.

This course needs major improvement. Lectures included errors in the code. While showing code in video lectures instructor was quick to delete code, not giving time for students to view and understand what had just been shown.

On Dec 15, two weeks before due date of final project, large portions of all weeks of the course were changed, requiring going back through to complete these new lectures. No adjustment was made to the due date.

Requirements for the final project are vague and confusing and I am not able to submit the final project by the due date in about 2 hours. If this issue is not addressed I will need to consider adjusting my star rating.

This experience casts a negative impression for me on the Coursera platform and University of Toronto teaching staff.

I'm disappointed.

The Good:

The idea of having the lectures in a Q&A style, two experts in continuous conversation about the topic has a potential

The Bad:

That potential is wasted on poorly planned lessons and course content

The Ugly:

Instructors run the Swift code that is written during the lesson and they get a wrong result due to an error in the code. They both agree that the result is weird but then continue to explain that this is how Swift works. In short, they are misleading and confusing you on a topic you are trying to learn.

This is of course unintentional but gives you a clue about how the quality check on lecture videos are taken care of. Details here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/swift-programming/discussions/DBk-SJO2EeWNbBIwwhtGwQ

Pros

Concise

Modular based learning

Cons

Course needs more auto graded assignments.

Lack of feedback in discussion forums.

Assignment language is not very clear.

Overall I prefer this course to the android specialization but not for the reasons you may think. The android development platform is more or a less a mess compared to ios. Android studio feels more like a toy than a complete product. Emulation is slow and almost un-usuable with plenty of boilerplate code required to do simple events. Xcode by comparison is very smooth and easy to use. Swift syntax is also very clean compared to Java syntax. But is not without its grievances.

At the end of the day you will choose the platform you work best in.

The lectures for this course seem unorganized and often had poor audio. The content covered in many lectures seemed off topic. Quiz questions would then focus on the off topic information making it confusing with regard to what material to focus on during a lecture. Do I focus on the proposed subject of the video or the many tangents about other topics. This combined with the unorganized nature of videos(just winging it) made the lectures distracting. The lecture videos are full of code that simply does not work in the real world and help from staff takes literally days to get(and not just over the weekend).

This course requires you to know a good deal of programming and is an introduction to a new language. I found the lessons did not clearly explain the material and the quiz at the end of each section/week was...just that a quiz, it would have been more helpful to have a micro-test to evaluate if you had digested the material.

The final test required advanced skills that had not been taught in the course. It is also possible that the test was relevant to the material, in which case it was very poorly worded.

Videos are poorly done and leave a lot of useful details out. There is zero support from staff in the forums. If you take this course, plan on spending a lot of time doing research on external sources in order to gain an understanding of the very broad and lacking in detail videos.

To improve this course, the instructors should:

-provide links to at least one textbook on Swift

-add Mentors to the course to help students in the forums

-include a repository of code snippets for practice of the concepts

Not the worst, but I did not think this was a well developed course. It felt like an informal conversation between the instructors with one of them repeatedly calling different aspects of Swift "cool". It was very distracting. I also thought the tests were vaguely worded and the final assignment was long and definitely more than the 30 minutes it said it would take to complete it. I am all for difficult challenges, but it felt like the final project was badly designed/described. Un-enrolling.

The video materials were very poor, they did not cover all the aspects and the explanations were very brief. The course only contained a single project, which although fun, is not enough for learning a new language. After completing this course I feel that I don't really know Swift, but I can use it. After each week you have to complete a quiz. They should replace these quizzes with project, where you write real code. I took this course for free, but I wouldn't pay for it.

It might be a great choice if you are already familiar with Swift programming! There is a huge gap between the week 1-4 and week 5, in other words during the first 4 weeks, you will learn about just the syntax and idea of swift programming but all of a sudden you have to write a program with over 50 lines of code.

I would recommend to offer more details and more practices during the first few weeks from this course before writing a complicated program.

Very disappointed. Having coding assignments weekly would have been very helpful. The quizzes often asked for information that was never presented in the lessons. The instructors were never present in the forums to answer questions. The final project asked us to do things that hadn't even been mentioned in the course materials. I would not recommend this course to anyone. The only reason it got 2 stars instead of 1 was because I did learn some Swift.

Probably guys did big amount of work, but the course looks extremely raw. Half of lectures time is talking about nothing and it seems that there were no lecture plan before shooting the video. It would have been ok if the course had been free, but I expected much more from it for that price.

Thank you for you work, but, I think, you need to keep improving the quality of the course.

The course need more improvements in terms of material, presentation and execution. The two presenters format didn't work well as it made the lecture look informal. The material need better preparation and it seems at times to be ad-hoc coding. A few videos were not edited properly resulting in lengthy black screens after the presenters were done talking.

This course is not as polished as most other courses on coursera. They occasionally give examples that are too small to see in the video. Most of the quizes dealt with syntax. I don't feel like any new skill was developed in taking it. If you are interested in iOS programming take the University of California, Irvine versions of this class.

Lectures are careless prepared. It's really hard to follow this course without previous background in iOS development, despite it's called "Introduction To Swift Programming". There are a lot of small misleadings notes in course materials. Hope the next course in specialization "iOS App Development with Swift" would be much better.

The lectures are fairly light and there are no assignments throughout the course to reinforce the material. Mostly they just introduce a few concepts then point you at the Apple Swift documentation. They really don't go into much detail.

The final assignment is good for getting your feet wet but is poorly specified.

In my honest opinion, the quality of this course is not that high. You can expect to learn some basic syntax of Swift, and that's about it. There are very little material each week, and then you get a quiz, which is not the best form of examination nor for learning. I do not recommend this course.

The course should have been more thorough and should have been accompanies with good programming exercises as well..At some starting course there was also some cross talk among the instructors. The module on image processing should be reviewed as after some point it becomes sort of boring.

The professors did no prepared the classes. They make so many mistakes in the video lectures and they also laughts in the middle of the course and they send a non-professional feeling to the students. The content of the course is very good, but the proffesors could really do better.

A little bit too light and not really challenging. Just a quick view of the language. The teaching team does not seems really organized : just a quick view of the language, no slide, just someone who is presenting code on screen, no real support on the forum from the teaching team.

Should be lecture by Professor instead of BS student.

The content was not well organized.

Also should prepare slides and explain the Swift for more details.

More exercises needed in each weeks lecture.

Hopefully, this course should improve next time.