I do not recommend taking this with Shen. Shen would usually read right off the slides (though recently she said that she's trying to improve on this), lectures were very disorganized, it was difficult to tell why the concepts in class were important (i.e. how things fit into the bigger picture of cloud computing) so I had no idea why I was learning certain things. Homeworks was reasonable but I have no idea how relevant they were to Cloud today because she never explained this, or she did but I didn't understand because all her explanations are hard to follow. Almost everyone in the class showed up because attendance (taken through in-class quizzes) were require, but over half the class was always on their laptops. Shen did, however express interest in continued improvement in her teaching abilities .Perhaps she'll be a decent teacher in the (very distant) future. Office hours with her was somewhat helpful.

If you ever wonder if you should take this course with Humphrey or Shen and you want to actually learn something take it with Humphrey. If you just want to have an easy A, take it with Shen. Her class requires very few brain cells.

This was probably the easiest A in a CS class I've ever gotten. That being said, I didn't get much out of the class. Prof Shen is extremely sweet and she cares about her students a lot; however, the course just sucks in general. The material is uninteresting, the HWs are dumb, and the Programming Assignments (PA) require no programming. (The only cool PA was the Map Reduce one...) If you want the easy A, take it with Shen... but, I strongly advise you take it with Humphrey