I began the JHU Data Scientist Specialization on Coursera and worked through the Data Scientists Toolbox and R Programming classes, but found them a bit lackluster in their presentation.<p>The course content (videos, slides) presents some basics with a large emphasis on having a &quot;hacker ethos&quot; to do more work and digging on your own to be successful. The quizzes and projects in the R course demanded the use of techniques that were outside of the content provided in the lecture. I am not against having a hacker ethos and personally am happy to research and learn on my own, but I fail to see the logic in charging money to tell people to Google. I expect a curriculum to be a self-contained unit of learning, or else I wouldn&#x27;t bother with curriculum.<p>Contrast this to Coursera&#x27;s excellent (and free) Rice University Interactive Python Programming classes that are really superb. The Rice University team put together an online Python interpreter complete with graphics capability so that students could test each other&#x27;s code. The R class left peer review of students&#x27; code as &quot;do not run the code, eyeball it and see if it looks right&quot;. I understand why they did it (execution of potentially harmful code), but Rice&#x27;s solution was elegant.