Since for some reason the previous courses in the specialisation hide their reviews from the public, here is the review I wrote for "IBM COBOL Software Development Practices". It is entirely applicable to this course, and almost certainly the remainder of this specialisation: ================================================== I thought the previous courses in this “specialisation” were lame. This one takes it to a whole different level. It amazes me that a course with ZERO CONTENT can be put up on Coursera. What amazes me even more is that IBM endorses this mockery. Module 1 is "say hello", module 6 is "say goodbye". The remaining modules consist of several "lessons", which in turn are made up of: - 1-2 videos which are between 15 and 50 seconds long, where a glitchy text-to-speech reads a couple of headings that are allegedly covered in the module. By the way, for module 1 it goes something like "In this module you will learn how to: - blah - Introduce yourself (sic) - blah". - A link to an external resource (the "module reading"), which, more often than not, is not found, other times is behind a paywall, and is often a commercial product’s landing page, popular science writing, or some kind of online tutorial of questionable trustworthiness and English spelling. - An ungraded quiz containing questions that are often not covered anywhere in the module (i.e., in the external reading, when it is accessible), about outdated products, or wrongly phrased, expecting inaccurate answers or not accepting the correct answer. But don't worry, an empty or supposedly wrong answer to one of the questions will get you the "right" answer in the form of a preposterous recommendation to "revisit the [...] lesson to learn that [expected answer]". Each module ends up with a graded quiz, which consists of all its lessons' ungraded quizzes merged together, and a final 10-15 seconds video where the text-to-speech reads the module's headings again. Is this really the best we can expect from IBM? Has Coursera lowered the bar to such an extent since I last took a real, top-level, demanding, specialisation?

This was the worst course I've taken at Coursera so far. Very poor content, the videos basically present a couple of texts that are read aloud by an AI in a boring intonation, The same information is repeated several times, both in the videos as well as in the assignments. The "reading" sections are just links to other sites (some of them broken). I was able to complete it but I can't say that I've learnt a lot.

Excelente y la informacion es maravillosa. Gracias.

Is important always learn the concepts

this is a very good course about db2

muito bom

Good!

there was one section that you had to become a member to read the article. that should not be necessary and i did not read t hat article.

it´s good explanation the basic concepts but is few practice

There was alot of reading.

Helpful

Excellent course but needs to update links and it would be better to have more practice in the IBM environment.

It feels lackluster in comparison with the previous ones

lots of readings, lazy materials composition

no labs, vidoes are all cut short.

REALLY BAD.

Looks like the instructor didn't wanted to prepare this course, all the contents are lkinks to "readings" which various no lopnger exists, questions in quizes which makes no sense or simply wrong, for example: Question: This clause identifies a file in the COBOL program to be associated with an external data set. Expected "SELECT" but is wrong because SELECT is a STATEMENT not CLAUSE!

Question: How do you program COBOL to identify an index-name? "Correct" option "You create an index by using the INDEXED BY phrase of the OCCUR clause to identify an index-name." "OCCUR" clause? and is SELECT STATEMENT!

Finally: this course does not teach you how to program in COBOL, is 99% theory. Shame IBM!

This is the least enjoyable course in the whole series so far... The videos are just short intros and links to web pages, some behind a paywall, some doesn't exist anymore. Readings are important to complement the learning but if I wanted just links I would search Google and read it myself. The instructor didn't even bother to summarize the reading contents in more details in the course videos and many answers for the quizzes were not even in the reading links. I was really disappointed with this course.

Instructor does nothing but point (confusingly) to other course material on other training sights (Tutorialspoint, IBM) and tells you to read. No meaningful hands on experience. Doesn't even walk you through setting up Visual Studio with COBOL extensions. Just sad. worse online technology course (out 20+ so far) I've ever taken.

IBM should look into this. It's pitiful.

Conceptually this course has potential, but a lot of the COBOL material is covered by much better courses such as "IBM COBOL Basics" and "IBM COBOL Core" which both has much more in-depth videos discussing the material. The aspects of file management and databases is very superficial and mostly just direct the learner to go elsewhere to read the material.

The videos seem to be cut in the middle or just terribly ended. Paying to be sent to another website to read an article when the instructor should be teaching is terrible. 90% of the class if just reading from some website and some of the articles do not work or are behind an account login.