Overall, a very interesting and deep look at a the structural issues which plague the Arab Spring. The readings, however, consistently required more then the allotted 1 hour set in the course.

It was a very informative course but the number of quizzes were excessive and sometimes questions were unrelated to the lecture topic.

Good experience and materials. It is neccesary to consider external factors in the same manner as internal ones.

Meaningful insights on the causes and consequences of the Arab spring from several points of view

It is biased by the opinion of the teacher.

Very interesting

nice course

This was my first course on Coursera. For context, I am final year undergraduate student studying International Relations, I am quite experienced in this area.

I had high expectations for the course, but sadly these were not met. The content itself was interesting, but presented in a very dry way. Dr. Afsah was clearly reading from a script the entire time, and the information became very hard to absorb because he was not really 'lecturing', but rather just 'presenting'. Very convoluted academic language was used, which also often did not make sense (English is obviously not his first language, but he is nevertheless very educated). The fact that, I, and educated university student who speaks native English, could not understand The quizzes are quite easy and there is no other form of assessment.

My biggest criticism is of the discussion forums. My native language is English, and none of the prompts made sense. There was no question, or even a point of contention. Instead, simply a statement with little context. I was not alone in not understanding this, as 90% of people did not respond at all (like me), or simply wrote one or two words (like 'good'). Discussion forums and prompts can be a great way to reinforce your learning, but they were useless here.

Awful. Quizzes are broken down unnecessarily and barely any opportunity to critically engage. Not worth it

I​ watched through part of the first week and decided not to continue. The instructor is biased toward the eurocentric perspectives. They ignore for example the impact of the west starting from the Sykes-Picot Agreement, western mandates and modern innovations and occupations. One can not assess such a complex situation just by relating back to these "Arabic and Islamic exceptions" as it seems to be a lack of understanding of cultural differences by intellectuals who have no background in the richness of philosophical approaches to analysis and only look at reality from the lens of enlightenmet and rational whereas reality is more complex than that. I deem the course racist and harmful and I hope that other more sophisticated cultural thinkers would write a piece on this.

Orientalist giberish amounting to nothing intelectual and nothing constructive.