Good course

Good Course

USEFUL INFO

Great!!!!!

bon depart

very nice

excellent

awesome

awesome

Great!

great

Great

Good

nice

Good

good

good

good

good

nice

Nice

yay

5

I enrolled in this course in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic. I watched all of the video lectures, completed the quizzes, submitted my assignments and reviewed the work of my peers. The only thing I did not do was submit my final exam (reasons below).

What’s great about the course: There is a great deal of content that introduces lots of social science concepts that affect happiness. You can delve deeper into those elements that interest you and have a base line knowledge of those that don’t.

Dr Raghunathan is a great presenter with passion for his subject. The cheesy music and jokes grew on me as I realised they were his authentic style.

Some of the exercises were fun and introduced their concepts in a gentle and thoughtful way.

What could be improved: The errors in the course are distracting and disappointing (I’m talking about the ones that impact how the course works operationally (e.g. not being about to upload assignments in a certain format when videos say that you can do so, being told assignments have been submitted late when they have not, being told you have answered questions in lectures wrong because you did not use a capital letter) rather than typo errors or the wrong pictures being referenced). I understand that there isn’t a commercial drive to correct these errors in a free course, but we are six years on from when it was first created and some of the main errors impact people’s enjoyment and progress, which in turn will impact whether people will pay for a Certificate at the end (it did me).

Peer reviews: while I completely understand that this course aims to be as inclusive as possible, it lacks credibility for people to pass assignments when they don’t understand the assignments, or have plainly put no work into them. For example, one of the questions was “what makes you happy?” To gain points one simply had to list a few examples of things they personally did that made them happy, an answer presented to me just said “lots of things” and nothing more, When I tried to award zero points, I encountered error messages and could not submit my marking.

The final exam: This comprises of 12 questions in two parts (a) and (b) that covers all of the content of the course.The exam is a tall ask/order in terms of requirements and content, particularly when you consider the lower level of skill and knowledge students have needed to pass the assignments that have come before it. I would suggest that the part (a) sections of the final exam were incorporated into the weekly assignment tasks so we get accustomed to the rigour you’ll be expecting at the final stage. Then the final exam should only be comprised of the final six (part (b)) questions (and we were only required to pick three or four of those to answer and submit). I suspect a lot of people, like me, quit the course before submitting the final exam. I was all up for showing you what I learned and what I committed to do to improve my happiness; the final exam misses the mark in achieving that, which is a shame.

I had reached the last session of this course when it suddenly became impossible to access the video. i had to wait several days before this was possible (other videos from other sites were OK so must have been local to you and not a fault at my end) Then when I could access the site again I found I could not reconnect with the course at the level at which I had left it but would have to start again. Unsurprisingly I did not want to do this but would like to finish what was a very interesting and thought provoking course and the presentation was excellent and deserves 6 stars... the prof is a star. I hope you can help in this matter as there does not seem to be anywhere on your site where one has the opportunity to contact Coursera with problems such as this as I do not think this review page is truly relevant to the problem but where else can I go? Please do not suggest the Community Forum.

Hopefully

Mary W