This course needs a cleanup of loose ends on some of the assignments. Some assignment requirements are very ambiguous and in some cases the solutions are not matching the requirements of what was due.

Real world data warehouse integrations are more complex than just inner joining the tables to drop those rows not found in the original tables. i wish more complex scenarios are covered.

Pros: Information is perfect for anyone looking at Business Intelligence as a career field, or already in the career field itself. I found the first week to challenge my on-the-job knowledge of a fuller set of concepts and general terminology.

Cons: The wording on the quiz questions, in some cases, seems much different than the PPT slides and the instructor's language. UPDATE: The wording is a significant challenge, even when advancing into the more complex topics. I have had many differences of opinions on the solutions based on wording in the requirements.

Some good parts on data integration but the key sections on DW design and in particular the assignment are really poorly written.

Good for Beginners to go for.

The course is very informative, but you have to work with a very slow website for an assignment and you need to install applications which are a lot of hassle and will cost you a lot of time. I still cannot get an application to work to finish the last assignment. Too bad for all the effort I put in so far and very frustrating.

This course was full of issues related to the installation and use of Pentaho Pivot 4J and Data Integration. The professor's presence is resolving these issues was practically nonexistent. Coursera needs to do a much better job at insuring that their professors are offering a quality course and living up to the expectations of the students. In the case of this course and the professor, they failed miserably. In addition, it is practically impossible to get support from Coursera when an issue exists and in most cases when contact is made, the assistance is minimal. It is a shame as the platform is nicely designed and the course topics are very interesting. If you are considering taking this course, be forewarned that the majority of the support of problems/issues come from the community, not the Professor or Coursera. In addition, you are required to grade the assignments of your fellow students. This is not done by the professor.

The course lectures were too sparse leading up to the final, very important assignment of learning to how to create an ETL package. More time and energy should have been spent on the technical aspects of the Pentaho Spoon program, rather than doing overviews of application pros and cons.

Not enough implication from the instructors in the course. Students are left alone with the material, without any answers to there questions on the course.

Peer review process subject to personal interpretation and leading to frustration for the students.

That's quite unfortunate as this provides a bad experience whereas the course might have been good without that.

In module 5 the assignment was not able to pass without looking for further assistance in the web. The knowledge of handling Pentaho integration tool was not good enough explained to pass the assignment. Some steps were really tricky.

totally unsufficient guidance on external tools needed. Forum is full of users asking for help and reporting problems with installation of neccessary software.

DULL

I feel like the courses were shot in 1999.

Disgracefully outdated course that does not match with the technology that it claims to use -- dont bother with this one

Too academic, maybe normal for a University course. But really not a practical course for someone wanting to pick up the knowledge or skills. even though BI is a big concept. The tools are not very popular in the market, either highly enterprised Oracle or free tools. Really, those tools are good for doing a few excercise or playing some BI games.

Awful. Just awful. There are dozens of students trying to install Pentaho and failing. Only reason I managed is that I have prior experience with the software. There are no TAs, no help, nothing. The Quiz is a scam designed to force you to shell out even more money of the so-called-optional textbook, and the assignments are extremely vague and orders of magnitude beyond the laughable 30 minutes the instructor suggested they should take. My submissions for week 3 total over 30 pages -- and I work a full time job... Avoid this class, do not reward terrible courses with your cash.

Course is very high level and teacher inspiring. As I highlighted already it took me 8 hours with a professional to install Pentaho... for what? to explain pivot tables totals. that is very unecessary. Also from Europe virtual machine use is just killing my computer and I end up spending more time crashing and restarting my pc than working on the course. (and I am surrounded by IT professionals in my company for reference). This is sadly a big let down for an excellent course theory wise.