Complete waste of time.

Lectures and videos are messy and boring, labs are hard to get through, quizzes are dummy and there's no real assignment checker. And I'm an experienced FPGA developer, familiar with Altera design flow. I don't recommend this course to anyone, it's not even a course but a bunch of poorly linked boring videos. The worst 50$ spending in my life.

The software assignments assume that the user is familiar with the Intel FPGA SDK flow and has Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro software version 19.1 with Arria® 10 family support installed. This is a tall ask. The instructors need to create a module 0 where they explain how to setup the system before starting with the openCL fundamentals.

Additionally there should make available a time limited license for students to use while enrolled in the course

Extremely poor and unnerving presentation of every single topic, regarding both OpenCL and FPGAs. Extremely disappointing.

Pros:

well-packed contents, that you may need additional materials to understand what the instructors really mean (I chose "OpenCL in Action"); I have no prior knowledge on OpenCL nor FPGA so I have learned a lot.

Cons:

Errors in quiz answers, such that sometimes you have to choose wrong answers to get passed;

Less responsive instructors;

C API and C++ API being mixed in the lectures;

Overlapped contents from the two instructors; introduction to the toolchain (especially under Windows) should be at the beginning of the course not in week 5 in my opinion;

As a non-native English speaker, I found the second instructor (Nikhil, in week 5) lectures much clearer than the first instructor (Dennis, in week 1--4), who always sounds like only pronouncing 2/3 of each word; of course this is my problem.

All in all it's a unique course where you can learn something to start, but I would say there is still room to improve, so that the course doesn't look like a KPI project from Intel for just increasing some counter.

To Coursera: that clicking outside the review dialog box will erase all the content that one has input is a very stupid design.

The topic is really interesting but there are some prerequisites for your system that were not declared in the description. Moreover, a question in one of the tests was not implemented well, to be more specific you chose the correct answer and when you submitted it the feedback you would get is "Incorrect! Correct: the answer you gave". Of course, this is an issue as long as these tests were obligatory for the the Certificate. During week 2 we were supposed to submit a code. This the point I decided to stop this course, not only I needed Quartz Prime Pro (which is not free and not declared in the description) but also as a peer student found out the grader would only accept as correct a .txt file with character 1 inside. I kid you not! On the bright side the videos were well-structured and the concept of OpenCL was explained sufficiently given that this is an introductory course. I am sure that this course is not the rule for coursera, undoubtedly there must be a lot of excellent courses provided. But given that this is the first course I watched (and paid) in Coursera.org I am pretty disappointed. I hope my refund request wont be denied.

It was so difficult to sit through even a 5-minute video without zoning out. Idk, some bg music would have been good maybe.

Pretty OK, but can't do the tasks because you need special SW which is not provided. Also, attended the course at 1.25x speed because the speakers were talking so SLOWLY.

This course was really helpful! Looking forward to more courses from Intel.

Not good instructors

Coding Exercises need to be done more interactively so, people can setup a proper workflow.

A specific document for setting up the environment in Ubuntu/Windows from scratch would be helpful as most of the people who are taking this course will be working on them.

Also providing links to the sources for setting up the environment are necessary for any of the intel specific packages to be installed in the environment.

I appreciate this course for those are wanted to learn FPGA

Good Introductory course with labs

best course for beginers

I wish it had more hardware perspective because for RTL designers it difficult to visualise software being autoconverted into hardware. Performance comparisons with Verilog would have been helpful.

Needed more detailed videos with one example on quartus, and else everything is fine

It would be more interesting if you could provide more hands-on experiments

Great introduction to the fgpa's working model and how realtime api's work

It was really a nice opportunity for having these courses free.I loved it.

Need more application practice resources

Good content. The only issue was how the graded programming assignments were handled. Submission failures universally produced a result "reread the instructions" with no further details provided. The course provided source code solutions, even these failed to submit. Has me wondering if there is some issue with the grader back end. Ended up still able to pass the course, and the programming exercises were useful and ran well, but was a source of frustration. Might be better if they eliminated the grading and just showed what the output of each program looks like so you can self verify and move on. Based on the forum postings, many others were similarly frustrated or confused by this part of the course.

Mandatory programming assignments would have made the course much more effective.

Quizes seem buggy. You end up failing a quiz even though the comment says the right option was chosen. SImilarly, you end up passing quizes even if you select an incorrect option.

As there is no instructor plus course is very basic. It should have been designed hand on.

Very basic.

Very badly recorded sound. I was not able to listen on mobile phone, only on my home PC with sound volume set to maximum. The content of the course was very basic and all labs requires Linux machine (even though Intel offers Windows version of their tool). I did not feel any more confident with OpenCL since before this course, I wrote exactly one OpenCL kernel.

The intel FPGA SDK OpenCL 19.1 is a legacy version. It's so difficult install intel FPGA SDK packages: on linux it's impossible running correctly the exercises, some errors occurs. At last, I achieve install it in windows, and compile with aoc and aocl tools, but information about how made it is no in this course. This is the main reason for my low score.