This course (and the other Paleontology Offerings) have given me a new interest in the subject. Thank you, University of Alberta for providing so much information in such an interesting format.

Thank you for this excellent course! I really enjoyed the short videos, the concise notes, and quick quizzes (both at the end of each lesson, as well as the main point quizzes throughout the videos).

Interesting course, a excellent way to teach this world to far countries where the science education has any fails, an appropriate introduction to paleontology world, thanks to every instructors, especially Dr. Philip Currie and Betsy Kruk. a hug from Colombia.

The instructors' explanation are very clear and easy to understand. Would definitely recommend this to anyone who is interested in Paleontology or dinosaurs in general. I really had fun learning.

An amazing and thorough course! As a biologist I was fascinated to learn more about this topic because we didn't spend much time going over it during our Vertebrate Zoology course. You can clearly see the amount of work that went into this course and I'm very thankful for every teacher. Of course, a huge thanks to Betsy Kruk for the massive narration! I will definitely recommend this course to all of my friends. I can't even describe how much I've learned from it: from the origin of dinosaurs and their extinction to stratigraphy and anatomy.

I enjoyed this course and I thought it was very well presented. Also, there was a lot of interesting material in the course, and put into a good sequence for learning, I thought. The videos and drawings in the course are enjoyable, and make the course much more user-friendly than it would have been otherwise. If I had one change to make it would be that sometimes when there's a mini-quiz during a video, it would be nice for there to be a slightly longer pause with the drawings before the answer submission page pops up. This helps a person actually look at the drawings along with the words, while thinking about what the answer would be. Of course you can just pause the video if needed, and this is what I did after I figured this out. I don't know if everyone would have appreciated a slightly longer pause as I mentioned, or if that was just me. Anyways, thank you for offering this online course! I know way more about dinosaurs, how they evolved and lived than I did before. Oh just one more note about the educational technology - I thought it was cool to look at fossils with the 3-D fossil-viewer that could be manipulated! I somewhat liked what was done with the geologic time scale in the interactive version, but I was also glad that I had already gone to the earlier link to see the geologic time scale listed in a chart format, as this was easier if you were looking for something in particular or just wanted to read through it, even though the interactive version was more pleasant to sit and have presented to you. Again, though, I wouldn't assume everyone is the same as me in this.

Even as a dinosaur nerd, I still learned a lot. Instructional videos with embedded quizzes were very well constructed. I'm just a bit bummed that I couldn't access the fossil viewer for some reason.

The (near) Perfect Course for me.

Uptill now I was not especially interested in Dinosaurs, but as amateur Palaeontologist I was looking for a Course Palaeontology that suits my special interest: Pleistocene Mammals.

But this Course Dinosaurs Palaeobiology offers so much more than Dinosaurs and many of the toppics are useful for other species too, such as:

Death and Fossilisation; Eating; Moving around; Birth, Growth and Reproduction; Attack and Defence; What is a Species; Evolution; Stratigraphy and Geologic Times and Paleogeography and Plate Tectonics.

I have studied the Lessons with great pleasure and I learned a lot thanks to the clear explanations of Dr. Philip Currie and Mrs Betsy Kruk. The Course is very well composed with PDF for reading, Video for watching and interactive media for doing exercises. The quiz at the end of each lesson was also good and easy to answer after studying the lesson and handles more about understanding the content than reproduce endless lists of difficult names.

Now I am studying the last 2 chapters and I can say that I have learnt a lot, thanks to Dr. Currie and Mrs Kruk and I am looking forward already for other Courses of the University of Alberta. Probably Early Vertebrate Evolution will be next and Marine Vertebrates after that.

Great class! The first six weeks are a little bit too introductory (maybe more high school level than college level) but the instructors try to teach scientific reasoning at the same time and therefore it's not dull. The next six weeks are great. The use of the media is very good with pictures, drawings, a 3D fossil viewer, and some videos on fossil sites. Course notes are provided for each lessons (they are very well done). The presenter, a master student at the time if I am not mistaken, is great, though she is very surprisingly not credited on the course website, which is a shame. The course leader is great and inspiring and the grad' students who took in charge some of the sessions did a very good job at it.

The weak spot of the course are the in-video quizzes. Sometimes the presenter says to check all that apply and it's not possible, sometimes the questions are asked before the topic is covered and we are therefore asked to guess, sometimes the questions admit of several interpretations and even, in some instances, the interpretation given by the instructor doesn't sound right, which suggests that the question was poorly phrased.

Thank you. I enrolled in this course during Lockdown as my school is closed and I wanted to learn about Dinosaurs 🦕. I did this course all by myself and whenever my mumma got time, I showed her interesting videos. I liked the 3 D fossil viewer. It was really fun and realistic. I am 10 years old and in Class 4. I completed my quizzes but it was sad to know that when I wanted certificate for the course it said verify you are 13 years or above. When I enrolled I did not knew this as my mumma suggested me this course after knowing my interest in dinosaur 🦖. I am ready to share whatever I have learned in this course if someone wants to verify that. May I request Coursera people to allow me to get my certificate. Please... thank you. - Deeksha Divya Padhmanabhan, class 4, Sunshine Worldwide School, Goa, India

A wonderful course for beginners to learn about dinosaurs from how they began, lived, evolved and went down in the end as one of the most successful group of creatures ever to live on the planet

Great that it's free, and while it does give a lot of interesting information it is pretty low-level for a college level course. It is very much an introduction to dinosaurs (and some other related topics). Would love to see expanded course offerings.

I enjoyed this MOOC very much!! I've always loved dinosaurs since I was a kid and this a great opportunnity to keep up with our current knowledge on them. The only thing I had problems with was the Fossil Viewer Tool, which wans't working fr me and I don't know why. But aside that, congratulations to everyone involved in this course, love you guys!!

This was honestly incrediable. So much fun, fully engaging, amazingly interesting. I've been a prehistoric life here all my life but I've learned so much that I'm kinda sad it's over already

Thank you so much to everyone! I'll remember this awesome course for the rest of my life. Your teaching has a huge importance in my life now. I will always recommend you guys! See you!

Tenía conocimiento a cerca del tema, pero el curso me ayudó abarcar más sobre estas especies extintas.

Great for those childhood kids who absolutely loved dinosaurs.

hermoso

The course is very nice for beginners, and there was a great deal of investment in it. The direct observation in real fossils (both in the video and in the 3D fossil viewer) was very beneficial. The presenter was graceful and the lecture notes were good. However, for people with more than basic knowledge in dinosaurs the course is not enough and doesn't offer much new information. This course has the pontential to be expanded and elaborated by adding lessons with more profound survey of all the dinosaurs groups, their anatomical features and their ecology niche (e.g. considering 15-mins video of each major clade, such as theropods, coelosaurs, sauropodomorph, ornithopods, thyreophorans and marginocephalians). Overall the course was fun.

This course is great for anyone who wants a simple introduction to dinosaurs. The content covered is relatively simple and can be easily understood when you read the notes and watch the videos. However, I have a few suggestions for improvement. For the in-video quizzes, it would be good to add the images in the question itself as this would make it easier for us to reference them. Additionally, some of the links in the notes do not work and the fossil viewer only works occasionally (Although this might be a problem with my own laptop). Other than these minor problems, this course will be an enriching experience for anyone who embarks on it!

What a brilliant introduction to Paleobiology!I am a recent University graduate with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering and graduated during the COVID-19 pandemic. I wanted to take the time while a viable career search was on hold to do things that I would not have otherwise had the chance to do. This included studying topics that I have long had an interest in but my academic career steered me away from.I had never taken a biology course throughout my school years, so the lessons on anatomy were the most challenging for me, but the course was taught in such a way that it was easy to follow and both encouraged and suggested further research into things which were not second nature. The interactive questions during the lectures are a great continuous assessment and all answers are explained after you have completed them - which many other courses do not do!Many thanks to Betsy Kruk, Dr. Currie and the other guest lecturers for an informative and fun course!

Very interesting and well-set up course. In 12 lessons, you get a good overview of dinosaur paleobiology and the events that occurred around the globe, through which their evolution was influenced. With good quality video's, many fossil examples, in-video exercises and quizzes, the level is never too high to demotivate. Sometimes, the content could be a bit more challenging. However, this should only stimulate you to look for further information yourself. The lesson pdf's seemed a little redundant to me at first, as the video's basically provide you with the same information. After the first two lessons, I stopped reading the lesson plans beforehand. However, I think they are very useful upon completion of the course, to re-read and revisit the materials, to get a good picture. The presenters, Betsy and Phil, have done a terrific job in engaging their audience and increasing their interest in this field. Thank you!

I thoroughly enjoyed this course and was glad that I chose to do this. As a boy I was enthralled about dinosaurs, spent hours reading over dinosaur books, drawing their skeletons and wanted to be a dinosaur paleontologist when I grew up. I was a massive fan of Jurassic Park and beleived that one day we would be living in some kind of Dinotopia. Well, life turned out very differently however but when seeing this course available, it rekindled that nostalgia and excitement so I signed up. Its been a great course, it taught me things I never knew or simply forgotten. I got through it far quicker than the 12 weeks despite currently studying and working full-time, just because I enjoyed it so much. Thank you all for sharing this to people and if you ever need a hand digging bones or attempting to resurrect a dinosaur feel free to contact me, i'd quit my job in a heartbeat.

This class does EVERYTHING right! I am a course designer (the world is full of junk courses, including from Princeton, shudder) and I love, love, love this entire sequence, but especially this course. The flow is logical, the questions in the video ask you to think but aren't too far (they are scaffolded) away from what we might know or guess, the final questions are fair. And you don't use 5 new tech terms in the same sentence; you let us absorb the new info at the rate that the human brain can actually learn. I learned a few things just by watching you. A lot of credit to Dr. Currie for some of this: he uses the terms that need to be used, and plain English for common things like "river" (another class' Waterloo). Bravo to the gents and brava to the wonderful presenter. I just wish you had the budget for another 15 classes.... sigh.

It was well explained and I learned many things. But as someone who learns easily through drawing, I feel like it would have been better with more graphs or pictures. For instance, as a non-english speaker when talking about which dinosaurs lived at which periods, their evolution over time, which dinosaurs replace which one in the niche and differences between gondwana and Laurasia, it was not easy to follow everything without something graphic. Also, I would have like to learn about synapsid/diapsid and evolution earlier to better understand the difference between dinosaurs and other animals like reptiles. I know it was explained at the beginning with skull cavities but I only understood at the end when links between synapsid/diapsid were made.

Thank you very much for taking the time to shoot these videos!