good

good

good

👍

My

OK

GI

Л

.

g

v

i

I

Excellent general introduction to the fundamentals of GIS. The course instructor gives clear explanations and is quite easy to listen to and follow. Every lesson contains everything for a foundational knowledge of the particular topic or skill, without overloading or dragging on for too long. The lecturer is also careful to preface anything that will be gone into in a later lesson, so you never feel concerned if you see all the options available but only delve into a few.

The content is well structured and the course follows an easy pace, without both too much hand holding or leaving you wondering where to go next. Having done GIS before in university, I found this was an excellent refresher to prepare me for the rest of the specialization, but that someone with relatively little knowledge could also excel.

My only critical points are that there is occasionally the odd line which you need to listen to a few times, due to jargon or the odd phrase or stutter in the flow of the lesson, but overall I found it very easy to follow. Also in the reviewed assignment, the items which would be included in the marking rubric were scattered in the explanation document, so I missed them before my initial upload.

I enjoyed this course and was glad I did it. The material was explained clearly and the subject was covered in the right amount of detail.

I felt there are a couple of areas with room for improvement.

1. With the "Summarise this lesson" type sections, whilst this seems like a good learning tool, it just a shame it clutters up the same discussion space as technical questions. It makes it hard to scroll through and look for solutions to common problems, or help othes, as they get buried by the volumes of lesson summaries. Also I suspect it crowds out the space from getting help from the instructors, I didn't see much instructor involvement in the forum.

2. I found the early stage quite hard going just because of housekeeping issues with how to manage .mpk files, file structure and where to store the various file types. I realise some of this was covered in week 4, but it would still have been very helpful to have a bit of a talk or a document on opening the mpk files, managing things like home directories, default directories, linked folders, version control etc. Seems to me quite a fundamental part of using arcGIS that needs some good discipline.

Looking forward to the next course.

The course is excellent and I have no words to thank you for the guiding level of detail, breakdown of the basics, provided throughout. However, I recommend to increase the number of peer reviews of our assignments to 3 or 4 reviewers, and discard the outliers. I personally disagree with one my graders and posted a comment mentioning his grading deficiency but received the downgrading nonetheless. It's unfair after so much effort to be stuck with an unfair downgrading. There should be a quality control that allows prevention or revision of grader's shortcomings. In my specific case as a reviewer, I downgraded the same person above for the opposite reason he downgraded me, but I explained the reasons in the comments section. He evaluated my work hastily based on what he applied in his assignment instead of following directions. I hope you'll read my comments and provide feedback.

The professor is wonderful; he explains everything in a way that's easy to understand yet is not dumbed down. I learned a great deal in this course and I'm looking forward to the next one. I would have given 5 stars but for 2 reasons:

(1) The professor either does not read the forums or just does not respond to questions, so there needs to be a way to contact him with questions. We cannot rely solely on our peers to help with any issues we have, as they are still learning, just as I am.

(2) The grade for the final project is based on peer review. I considering dropping another star and rating this course as 3 stars due to this. What is the point of doing a project where the only feedback comes from other students who are at the same level as I am? I expected more from a UC Davis course; specifically, that I would receive some kind of feedback from a professional.

Great course with engaging material and enthusiastic and experienced instruction. The materials, lectures, assignments, extras, links, etc. were excellent. Only two negative aspects occurred. The first was the initial lack of materials with which to follow the instructors as they went through various processes in ArcMap in their lectures. However, this was remedied quickly and materials were provided. The second was the instructional material for the week 2 assignment, which lacked the step-by-step detail and polish of the assignments from other weeks. This may have been due to the course being new and somewhat unrefined. Overall, the course was extremely helpful and well worth the time and money. I intend to continue on and complete the entire specialization.

I really liked the structure of the class and it's flexibility. I liked that there were assignments with step by step instructions that were not required. This allowed for the opportunity to practice new tools, but without the stress of grading. The reason I am only giving a four star rating is because the grading system for the final assignment. I liked the quiz section that you needed to enter attribute data into, but did not like the peer review system. There is so much variation between people. I literally received 100% from one individual and 0% from the other with no feedback to as why they graded the way that they did.

Enjoyable course with lots of topics covered for new users to ArcGIS. Only drawback is the course material uses a different software application than the software provided in the course so some of the functionality demonstrated does not match, but can be found elsewhere online so not a big issue. It appears that many students are struggling with the initial software installation so if an updated video or documentation for ArcGIS Pro 3 could be included, I think it would greatly benefit future students. Overall, very happy with the course; 4 only because of the software discrepancy. - DM

Good, easy to understand course overall, but I don't feel like I really learned how to use the software until the final project where I had to figure out how to get the result I wanted on my own. That being said, I think the videos and the optional assignments were good for giving me an idea of how to get to my final result. I do wish there were additional small assignments in the class where you had to figure things out on your own rather than being walked through the process step-by-step.

Great course which covers a wide range of GIS applications and very thorough assignments along the way. Quizzes also have detailed feedback to enable you to check your progress. However personally I would have preferred more explanation about why something is done or the underlying concepts. I still feel like I have quite a shallow understanding of GIS. Also very focused on the professor's interest - hydrology in California. Nevertheless I still really enjoyed the course and learnt a lot.

Thank you for this wonderful educational content. I enjoyed it very much in the first and second week because you were putting the project identical to the beginning of the video, but from the third week you started putting the project with which the video ends. This frustrated me very much and was not helpful at all for me because I want to implement what you are explaining. In the video, I thank you again for this wonderful content and I hope you take my suggestion into consideration.

The course is great in the aspect of practice and hand on experience ! I liked the most how the instructor focused on doing examples in the videos and encouraging us to try them out on our own. Not to mention the practice assignments and the extra reading to additional practice.

The course also was successful in engaging the learners in discussion forums and lesson summaries.

I think its the perfect start to learn GIS and get the initial concept on how to navigate this area of analysis

Great beginners course for GIS for those who are working full time or have other schedules which limit their ability to go to a physical class. The only recommendation I would have is to have a better method to troubleshoot issues (i.e. more teacher or moderator interaction). Since this course has you applying what you learn through video, it can be tough to watch a video and do the work on your own. Otherwise, I learned a lot of great skills that I can now apply to my job!