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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.