This is an excellent Introduction course for GIS Mapping. I highly recommend it to evryone that want to start learning about GIS Mapping.

very simplified it is the perfect place to start your GIS journey.

Great class! Good design and wonderful videos!

Very detailed and beginner friendly!

The content is very well made. Concepts are well explained with plenty of graphics and examples to help understand. The topics are also very relevant, and one can tell that the instructor loves teaching well, cares about actual map making and has professional experience beyond academia. This is probably the best course of its kind on Coursera (I have already taken the GIS specialization which is its direct competitor from UC Davies). The drawbacks are: 1) no software provided, and the lessons refer to ArcMap, no longer available. One can use QGIS, for free, but will need to figure out how to use it, because the lessons cover ARCGIS. Alternatively, one can take UC Davies GIS, and use the student licence provided with that for this course too. 2) The forum discussions are quite dead, regrettably. Lots of people posting with ChatGPT text unnecessarily, so it is hard to run into any interesting comment or learnign opportunity. 3) There could be more hands on activities with the software, currently they are limited to some at the very beginning, which is not necessary to progress, and then the final assignment. 4) The final assignment is perhaps not clear enough, leading to people submitting maps with no attribute table or missing other required elements. It would be good if an example screenshot was provided. 5) Some just chance it for the certificate, so some submissions might be very lacking or simply taken from some atlas online. 5) Because the course is not super popular, there are few students in the same cohort. However, this did not hamper the peer review process, my submission was marked and the certificate assigned within hours of submitting.

Course video fundamentals were excellent but were weak on teaching the software. My software did not behave the same as depicted in the week three video. The assignment required a lot of self learning of the software and ALL of that self learning came from google and not course resources. I estimate I spent more than 30 hours trying to learn setup and the basic features of this software needed to do this work. The software is not intuitive so there needs to be much more explanation of the steps. For example, I now have separate folders for each 'layer'. These layers are referred to as layers in some 'help' inquiires and attributes in others. I have 30 years of computer experience in over 30 pieces of software, including some CADD but I still do not understand the basic file mangement protocol for this software. (I think my project actually was drawing points, lines, and polygons from separate folders on my computer instead of one folder. Also, I was very disappointed I could not understand how to get items in my table to show labels on my image (many hours looking). My employment will not afford me this many hours to complete a project stated as a 4 hour project. If I just wanted to randomly search for 'how to do A, B, C, etc on google to learn the software, I would not need this course.

I enjoyed the course. The only issue I had was the peer-reviewing of the final assignment - I had undertaken the task as required, and one peer reviewer gave full marks and the other seemed to not understand what was required and provide me with a very low grade, so I wasn't able to pass. I resubmitted the exact same thing so it was assigned to other peer reviewers and was able to earn my course certificate.

Good

Great background on what goes into making maps and how to interpret map projections. I learned more from this course than from a very expensive GIS course I took years ago. It gives you time to install and play around with ArcGIS, and it comes with a 1 year student license for the software. Information is well presented, and care clearly went into this course! I'm happy to have done it and I will continue on with the specialization. Thanks Prof. Boyes!

This course is the best GIS course I have ever taken, the explanations are simple and I was able to make my first digitalization after serval tries, Thank you Coursera, Thank you Dr. Don Boyes

One of the most important thing you need as a learner is intuition and prof Don is good at that , the concept I have leant have finally stick in my brain. I can always relate them to real world

This is the most basic course about GIS. The course is really worth taking. I am thankful to University of Toronto, Don Boyes and coursera for providing us the opportunity to take the course.

Great course. Don Boyes is very clear when explaining. I think you get to understand a lot of the concepts behind the software that are not easy to get when browsing through ArcGIS.

This course does not focus on the software tool such as ArcGIS.

This course does focus on the spatial reference system etc.

For me, that was very helpful.

For a newbie like me, they have laid out a simple and easy to comprehend modules, and with these, I am eager to learn more

Great introduction to theory, I really liked the way a lot of the information about projections and basic concepts were presented. I wish there had been a bit more of a practical component (like in the UC Davis course) to put to work the things that were being taught.

OMG. The information is great, but the quizzes...omg...they are the worst. I swear, they make me want to quit the course. They are poorly designed in my opinion and seem haphazardly designed. Just lazy, unhelpful and outright frustrating. Also, why does it take so bloody long to get some interaction going? You literally won't use arcGIS until after week 4. I can't wait to get offered to fill out a survey on this one. B

Course specifically geared toward year of release as ArcGIS software is no longer available for free with course enrollment. Course content specifies student package of Arc GIS is available but multiple attempts to sign up or use were unsuccessful. Attempted January/February 2021. Course needs significant revision to remain accessible to the public.

Joined Coursera especially to do this training but it's not till you go in to start the course that you find out you need to purchase the GIS software to actually complete the course. So unless I pay $100 to download it I can't do the course. You need to make this clear when the course is advertised.

They are out of ArcGIS licenses. It cannot be installed privately as well. They tell this after you purchase the course

No longer offer access to the software and the software is no longer in existence. Out of date. Not worth the time.

needed programs are not longer offered, course does not have unenroll option

A little bit unuseful due to Arcgis license to work by your own

Difficult to follow the course without license for ArcMap

Terrible, THEY DO NOT GIVE YOU ARCGIS software.