I got to learn about ray optics and all the basic mathematical tools needed for an optical system design. Also got a hands on experience with Zemax OpticStudio. The assignments and homework problems are really good. But the best part is the capstone project at the end.

Great content, although some questions in the quizes could be formulated in a clearer manner to avoid confusion or ambiguitiy. Overall a good experience and opportunity. Thanks to the instructors for creating this course.

Great content but the provided learning resources are limited to the video lectures and exercises. There is no staff helping in the discussion forums. Question hang there without answers for months.

The first week was a lot of derivation which was rough to get through, but the course became much more applicable in the following weeks and I learned a lot of useful concepts.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Great content and teacher.

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

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

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

it is little advance and in my view not well explained

Its ver good course for beginners like me

Challenging and good!

ok. a bit easy

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

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.).

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.

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.

The course per se is relatively well done, but the exercise and the final tests were nearly impossible to pass for the following reasons: 1. Most of the time they required the knowledge that you can find later in the course; 2. The verification of results was entrusted to a very flawed software (actual example of one supposed error: I wrote 0.142 the solution was 0.143 and despite they said that the range of error is wide, it was counted as an error; 3. Not all information for the tests was given during the course, neither before nor after the tests. Finally, this course and the software need to be improved.

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.

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.

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.