This course has a lot of potential, but leaves a lot to be desired. It’s definitely not for everyone, so take a few things into account before you join:

1) The lecture videos are pretty superficial. You can read the majority of the information in the first few chapters of pretty much any textbook on optical engineering.

2) There is a large discrepancy between the depth of information presented and the depth required to solve the assignments. Solving the assignments can often require a significant amount of time researching on the internet or in other optics sources to find the necessary background information.

3) Many of the assignment problems are very poorly written. Questions and explanations are ambiguous or unclear more often than not. I often had to solve the problems 2-3 different ways using a different interpretation of the question to get the right answer.

4) There is no interaction between the teachers and the course whatsoever. The forums are full of posts by confused students asking for help with 0 replies. Even now, well over a year after the course was created, the final assignment has technical issues that prevent students from even submitting the assignment as intended.

Issues #2 and #3 wouldn’t be critical if #4 were remedied, but the creators seem to have no interest in maintaining their course or interacting with the students in a meaningful way. In short, if you are looking to be dropped in the deep end of optical design and are an effective self-learner (seriously, you are on your own here), you can learn a lot simply by grinding through the assignments. If you are looking to be taught in the traditional sense, or for professionalism, look somewhere else.

Good Course but it is impossible to get any response from the Instructors or TAs and the fact that we were using demo version of the Optic Studio which had some limitations in comparison with the regular version (like number of decimal places displayed, lack of optimisation wizard, inability to save your work) and needed to be reinstalled every two weeks or so felt very unprofessional.

Very advanced, and might be intractable for those without some previous optics experience.

Nice Coarse to get started with.

Very poorly designed course. No one to ask or clarify requirement if you have any question. Project submission is such a mess that a lot of information can't be uploaded. Project instruction keeps telling you to save the file while a trial version that can't save any file is provided. Few peer to review assignment. This course just needs tons of polish before it's a good experience to go through. It's helpful to learn the knowledge but the process of studying is such a pain

Great course, but the tool (Demo version Zemax) is not very useful because of the removal of several important features (e.g. save, undo and limited precision).

This is a good course for those people wanting to start their learning in optical system design.

A unique and very well designed online applied optics course which provides insight to optics designing and helps in understanding the optical systems. After this course, i feel enriched with the optics knowledge. Anxiously looking forward for more courses in this specialization.

This course is an excellent and concise way to get acquainted with basic (paraxial, paper-based) optical design. I've been on a quest to self-study to becoming an optical designer and I've been looking for something like this - this is the course that addresses the gap in many an optical engineering text book. The assignments also necessitate some critical thinking and further study. The course is more involved than the overview would have one believe!

Learned a ton about paraxial optics design. Great lecture, capstone project is A LOT of work (>20 hour) for me.

I really enjoyed taking the course. Completing assignments especially after week 3 took me 2-3 times longer than the suggested specified time. However I learned a lot from this course.

Learning Zemax was always like a hurdle for me but amazingly the instructor walked me through the main features of the software and I feel you already know a lot about optical design and simulations.

The capstone project seems to be tough (I haven't started it yet), but it is worthed spending the time since it complements your learning and proficiency level.

I appreciate the content of the course, however, it is not meet my expectation. I did the the questions and most of the questions is pulling my attention on numerical calculation rather than understanding the optics principle. It is wasting of my time on those calculation rather than understanding the optics design. I would highly recommend the teacher think deeply and carefully to assign the homework and questions which would reflect to the value student paid rather than coping the questions from his/her real class or somewhere, good questions are really important for student to understand and digest the knowledge.

A few new insights even for a senior optical engineer. I will keep working through their lectures if each one offers at least a few nuggets of insight.

ok. a bit easy

Great content and teacher.

The course evaluation needs some debugging and problems should be better explained.