Although I was very enthusiastic at the beginning of this course, my enthusiasm was soon replaced by disappointment. There were several reasons for my disappointment: First, it is very difficult to understand Prof. ChengXiang Zhai. This is aggravated by the fact that the subtitles of his videos have not been edited and many of these subtitles do not really make any sense. Furthermore, some of the quizzes check on material that is only covered in the week after the quiz. Second, and more importantly, I was disappointed by the explanations offered by Prof. Zhai. Often, he just drops some technical terms without giving any explanation whatsoever. An example in point is his covering of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. He just dropped the name but did not offer any definition or explanation. Unfortunately, there were many more topics that were only covered in such a name dropping way. In the end, I bought myself the book by Stefan Büttcher and the book by Christopher Manning. These are excellent books that were also recommended by Prof. Zhai. For anybody interested in information retrieval I would actually recommend to go directly to these books instead of taking this course.

Literally this is a dead course. No one is active from course to assist students. You can't complete assignment 1 if you are not good with c++ and STL 'PERIOD'.

Giving up this course

amazing classes

The course conveys a lot of well-structured content. The theoretical concepts are taught well by the videos, although some videos are a little bit too long.

Unfortunately, I was not able to do the practical assignments due to technical problems with the installation of the required development environment. I missed experiencing in practice what I have learnt in theory.

very good course! teach not only knowledge but also how to do research!

good

The course does not give much of practical knowledge, mostly theoretical. For example, presented material does not teach you what is required to build a good search engine. Even theoretical part is mostly based on old view, which is proven to be not working. For some topics the exam was given before the topic was presented in lectures.

Interesting content

However the prof/instructor should practice not pausing so much when explaining the concepts/contents

Good one

Some courses lack lecture notes. There are some mistake in the week exercise (some question regarding topic in wk5 appears in wk4). So the overall feeling for the course is not well considering it is a part of the school's graduate program

Sir is Amazing. Reviews saying this course lacks practicals are true. Fact is, you will be able to implement them on your own, as sir explained concepts pretty well. This is by far one of the best courses on coursera, comparable to Mr. Ng's course on ML and DL

help for building a whole picture about the field

very hard to understand teacher

Some quizes were from different weeks. Forum questions are often left unsolved.

Lectures are fine for those who does not want to read a book and want to get a quick overview. Quizzes are very un-useful and buggy. There are questions presented that are not covered in the section. Programming assignments are optional because instructor did not want to adapt them for Coursera format so that they can be completed using tools of choice.

One of the best courses I have taken on Coursera. Really liked how the quizzes were structured!

Some mistakes in subtitle. and it is better to break down the long videos into smaller sections, illustrate the concepts with more graphs,picture and animation.

It is a great course, highly recommended for those who wants to work in the AI

very very good

The quiz content is out of sync with the lecture content and has not been fixed after what appears to be 2 years of comments in the course error message board and weekly discussion boards.

The most terrible specialization anyone would ever waste his or her time on! Sometimes i fell asleep lol

Time wasted.

I'd appreciate Prof.Zhai's lesson design with robust framework. BUT I really can not accept that the mistake that homework putted in wrong week and STILL NOT FIXED AFTER TWO YEARS!

Need indetail inputs on algorithm usage and correct MeTA assignments with working scripts. That makes learning a complete curve.

Great at theory and concept explanation... but just few examples and zero programming applications.

Usefull course with lack of support.