Here is my review of Sep-Dec 2014 incarnation of Machine Learning course on Coursera. Ranking is 4.8 out of 5 (excellent), while I passed with 100% grade.

Technologies: machine learning is a technology in itself, playing a central role in image recognition and machine vision, autonomous cars, search, AI, etc. Neural networks presented in homework can be readily adapted for a problem at hand. Learnt techniques can be used to gauge and optimize performance + visualize results and guide further improvements. Homework teaches Octave/Matlab.

Material: the course offers an introduction to machine learning, a flourishing field of CS. Various machine learning techniques are presented from simple logistic regression to neural networks and support vector machines. Multiple applications are described such as anomaly detection, recommender systems, and OCR.

Instructor/Lectures: Andrew Ng worked closely with Google and Baidu Research on applied machine learning. He is very enthusiastic about the subject. Andrew often provides practical tips and elaborates on common pitfalls in the real-life applications.