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Learner Reviews & Feedback for First Order Optical System Design by University of Colorado Boulder

4.3
stars
305 ratings

About the Course

This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5600, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyewear to medical endoscopes to cell phone cameras to orbiting telescopes. When you finish this course, you will be able to design, to first order, such optical systems with simple mathematical and graphical techniques. This first order design will allow you to develop the foundation needed to begin all optical design as well as the intuition needed to quickly address the feasibility of complicated designs during brainstorming meetings. You will learn how to enter these designs into an industry-standard design tool, OpticStudio by Zemax, to analyze and improve performance with powerful automatic optimization methods....

Top reviews

JA

Aug 8, 2022

I enjoyed very much this course! It gives a detailed (yet understandable for a broader audience) introduction to several methodologies to understand optical systems, mostly lenses, and their design.

RG

Aug 25, 2019

Really nice course with very clear explanations of the principles of optical engineering and learn how to use ZEMAX Opticstudio to simulate your optical system

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76 - 100 of 106 Reviews for First Order Optical System Design

By Yang P

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Jan 7, 2022

One inconvenience is the windows software. But I mainly aimed to study the mathematics and it is quite helpful with all the explorations needed with the problem sets.

By Jaeseong L

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Mar 9, 2021

Well made course. clear lecture. removed one star because lecture note is not sufficient to cover all the concepts. Need more reading materials.

By JCO

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Apr 24, 2022

Excellent content and instructor, but, resources for this online course are a bit limited. Getting the OpticStudio software was a challenge.

By Orqa d o o

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Nov 21, 2019

Really valuable introduction to optical design, I learned a lot! It takes dedication though, but it's totally worth it.

By Saad M

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May 12, 2021

Assignments are difficult and the auto-grader is a bit buggy. But the course content and the faculty is great

By Stephanie A

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Aug 17, 2020

Excellent content and instruction. Difficult to get feedback on problems with software and quiz answer input.

By Hicham F

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Dec 11, 2018

Great content and teacher.

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

By I.D

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Jun 2, 2023

Many more examples are needed to grasp the whole point of the course and to make it more enjoyable

By Michael H

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Nov 15, 2020

Good course, beginning is a bit too elementary but later part is very educative.

By Akila S U

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Jul 23, 2020

it is little advance and in my view not well explained

By muthuserpi s

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Feb 6, 2022

Its ver good course for beginners like me

By Luc T

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Oct 6, 2020

Challenging and good!

By Віталій Х

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Dec 11, 2018

ok. a bit easy

By Alejandro M G S J

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Oct 11, 2021

Some things in this course are very cool, others not so much. The fact that it includes OpticStudio is awesome, so you can practice with the program as you do the course. Also the selection of topics is good.

As for the bad points, the first is definitely the allocated time. As a minimum you'll need twice as much as the indicated, and that is an info that you're not aware of before paying. It's not just me, I did the course with a fellow researcher and we both had the same issues. And the thing is, after completing the course with 77% grade I am far away from having the feeling of dominating the subject. I feel like there should be a selection of solved problems (not just a couple, and they should include typical optical devices) in order to help to master the knowledge. Many people master by doing, and in practice there is little chance to make these knowledge yours if you pass from one thing to another fast, without having a good deal of practice. In fact, before starting with the next course I will search for some design problems, like telescopes, microscopes and all that stuff, and solve them both by hand and with OpticStudio to feel comfortable before continuing

By Abigail M

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Apr 25, 2021

Informative but frustrating. I thought there would be more focus on OpticStudio, but this was only covered for one week. Dumb errors like repeatedly calling a "principal ray" (or axis) "principle" on powerpoint slides (potentially embarrassing for international students who might not know better)... Lots of quiz questions are ambiguously worded... Presenting equations as though systems in vacuum is a given... The pace of the course suddenly doubles in week five... I really think that this course would be drastically improved if it were accompanied by a lab of sorts that was more focused on OpticStudio -- giving the math a practical application that more closely mimics what the real industry looks like. Class could use a once-over to remove errors, ambiguities, and dated references (to websites, etc.).

By Christopher O

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Mar 10, 2021

The lectures were pretty good and overall I learned a lot. A lot of bugs and QC issues though. Multiple errors in the notes, such as a wrong formula in an early lecture in Week 5 which is corrected later. This caused me to get a couple of homework problems wrong several times before finding the correct answer on another website.

Also, the UC Boulder website no longer works for some of the exercises they ask you to do to practice getting a feel for optical systems. It was built in Flash, i think, and it no longer works.

Also, my subscription to Zemax ended a week early, before I was done with the course.

Also the instructors don't respond to any posts in the discussion forum, even if they are unresolved by co-students.

By Christoph

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Apr 10, 2022

Unfortunately the forum is not really operated and the autograder in the test sometimes does not accept correct results especially when they are not numeric but symbolic. I seemed to me, that some of the quiz or assignment questions could not be solved based on the questions but needed some research, which is OK from a learning and focus point of view, but I wasted a lot of time in the beginning of the course by re-viewing lectures and reading through notes.

I think, in general the course gives a good overview and introduction of the topic but lacks proper implementation or restructuring to work on the Coursera-platform.

By Mikkel N

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Apr 26, 2023

Overall this gives a nice introduction to more engineering aspects of first order lens systems. Lectures give a brief theoretical introduction with main focus on examples.

Assigments including questions in videos, practice and homework assignments are quite challenging. Thus, I would highly recommend having completed an introductionary optics class prior to this.

However, the value of the course is diminished not having access to the Zemax software.

In addition, the sign convention can be rather confusing with limited time spent on introducing this.

By Matt J

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Nov 14, 2022

The lecturer is fantastic, very clear and concise breaking down complex topics well. The problem is the length of the course far exceeding the advertised times. The homework's often rely on knowledge not obtained through the lecture series relying on initiative and TIME to research elsewhere. Not to be taken by anyone with a time constraint. The course is also mainly theoretical and not "built around" Opticstudio as I had hoped it would be. An excellent course, perhaps not best suited to being online without meaningful additional online resource.

By Leslie C

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Nov 16, 2020

It gives a decent overview of optics. I did have former college courses that introduced me to optics, but there isn't enough practice material here. It seemed to just give the raw skeleton. I understand it's up to the student to learn and not to give us step by step guides to every question. But at least give us several optional practice problems with maybe a numerical solution so we can practice and figure out on our own.

By Clint S

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Aug 8, 2022

The content is interesting, but the layout of information is not great. It would be good if notes were provided. I found myself often going to other sources for reference. Navigating through these videos is not the best way to review what was covered. One can read much faster then one can serach through a video - especially when there are mutliple videos to be serached through.

By Hyok L

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Nov 8, 2021

There were several questions in quizzes that were not possible to solve, based on the lectures. I needed to google. Other times, I'd get a wrong answer, and I have no idea what portion is wrong. One time, the feedback was that, the answer would be correct if I had the correct sign in one term. I changed the sign, and it was still wrong.

By Gema M

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Dec 18, 2020

Contents are good and the lecturer presents them in a clear way. Nevertheless, there is no response from the professors on the forum and the automatic grader doesn't work very well (it might give you a wrong answer just from rounding up). Solutions to the exercises should be provided at least once the quizzes are approved with 50%.

By Mithra A

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Jun 24, 2020

Overall the content was good. And it provided an initial path on how to go about optical designing. I sometimes feel the course does not have enough support to clarify my doubts. A chat box where a course candidate can clarify the doubts will be of great help.

By Shashank D

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Jul 18, 2021

The course was good however there are few things that stood out.

1) Notation and use of mirrors wasn't well explained

2) Quiz emphasis was more on solving algebra equation rather than hands on practice

3) Not much support on forums