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The course itself—the content and the way it is taught—is excellent and thought-provoking. I think it's a thorough and well structured introduction to the subject even for people like me who have had prior exposure to many of these elements in an unorganized way. I feel I've learned a lot and made tangible progress by getting to know these fundamentals.

The one big problem here is that the course relies entirely on peer-reviewed assignments (with the occasional automated quiz). You are graded by others like you and have to grade others to pass. I took my part seriously and gave thoughtful comments on other people's work, only to get, in return, nothing more than one-liners, non sequiturs, and on one memorable occasion, a single period (".") inserted by the reviewer in every text box to satisfy the requirement to input text.

Quite obviously, students aren't that keen on reading the guidelines and following them. This could also be due to the fact that it's an elementary course and few have the kind of critical vocabulary that is necessary for giving thoughtful comments on other people's creative work. After several rounds of such reviews I honestly started to lose interest in doing my own assignments as well, since I realized nobody was going to give me valuable feedback on them. On the reviewing side, I even had several cases where other students submitted the wrong kind of file for their own assignments, some of which couldn't be opened and viewed at all.

This course begs for the hands-on presence of actual human staff who would grade the assignments and provide professional feedback that enables the students to make real progress. At the very least, staff should review everything sent in by students to make sure assignments and review actually follow the guidelines and contribute to learning.

It could improve in the use of questionnaires within and during the videos. There are not, and they would be useful. Questionnaires at the end and after many videos is not as effective.

It would be good to ask the students to ask to be aware of making polite and polite corrections when grading and giving opinions about works. Aware that English is not the native language of all participants.

There are no more Spanish subtitles in the rest of the specialized course, for those of us who do not speak English, we can no longer continue. We cannot take the rest of the courses, there are no more Spanish subtitles. It's a shame.

Podría mejorar en el uso de cuestionarios dentro y durante de los videos. No los hay, y serian útiles. Cuestionarios al final y después de muchos videos no es tan efectivo.

Seria bueno pedir a los alumnos que al calificar y dar opiniones sobre trabajos, se pida ser conscientes de hacer correcciones educadas y amables. Conscientes de que el inglés no es el idioma nativo de todos los participantes.

Ya no hay subtítulos en español en el resto del curso especializado, para los que no hablamos inglés, ya no podemos seguir. No podemos tomar el resto de cursos, ya no hay subtítulos en español. Es una pena.

It's great experience. This course is informative. BUT. You won't learn anything about using programs that are needed to complete the course, it's something you need to learn by yourself, so be ready for that. Also, I want to say that peer-graded assignments have their own pros and cons: Judging others helps you understand how graphic design works. When you look at somebody else's work, your mind works a little differently, than when you do your own work. Looking at the works of others is really important, because, in graphic design, the experience of watching other people's works is, I would say, inevitable. However, if we talk about grading (judging), sometimes other students don't really care about your work when they review it. They just write a few sentences without really telling anything that would help to improve your work. But sometimes there are great students that do explain, I think it was not the best idea to make required assignments peer-graded, but who knows.

The course was very interesting, hands on orientated and it offered me a lot of useful information. I have really enjoyed it! It was also a good motivation to practice graphic design more often, explore the realms of shapes, colours, typography etc.

I was really grateful for the peer reviews, but I missed a bit more professional approach sometimes, for instance comments like "I like it" or "It is not that bad" does not tell me much about my work. So in these cases some feedback from someone who already is a graphic designer and knows much more about it than us, students, starting with the graphic design, would be more than welcome.

I also missed advices on where to find out more on a particular topic.

Overall, taking this course was a very positive experience and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in graphic design.

Pros

The information is good. This class is good for learning the vocabulary in graphic design. I already understood more general terms like scale and form. I learned new terms like figure/ground and visual contrast (or how graphic design defines it).

Cons

The teacher's pace for some of the videos is slow for the amount of information. On week 4, the pace slightly quickens. But overall, it's really slow.

Verdict

I would recommend this course for learning the terms of graphic design or getting a basic understanding of design principles. I also found the assignments fun. If you have some understanding of the basics of design and art, you do not need to watch every video. Feel free to skip on videos covering terms you have a general idea about.

An excellent introduction to graphic design. The videos were useful to clearly show the concepts. There were a number of assignments, many of them optional, which allowed you to practice and integrate the learnings. All material was taught at a level that made it accessible to a true novice.

My only hesitation on giving this course 5 stars was the lack of any presence of teachers/tutors in the course discussions. There was a lot of questions about the final marked assignment, with many posts on the discussion boards. There was no response from anyone other than the participants in the course. The issue was not clarified and students were left to interpret (and peer review based on that intrepretation) the instructions on their own.

I enjoyed the class very much. Even though I teach design for theatre at a university, I found it inspiring to look at these fundamental concepts through a different lens, and to learn more about typography, about which I had only an instinctual response before.

I wish there was some way to get feedback beyond the peer variety. Of course, we are all still learning and responses are going to be somewhat subjective no matter what, but I was often disappointed to find that the "feedback" I was offered amounted to one word, sometimes just "Hi," so that the learner could check that box and get on with their course.

Still, I got a lot out of this course and I plan to take the others in the Graphic Design specialization right away!

Learnt lots throughout this course which was great, thank you! However, sometimes assignments didn't quite make sense, even though there was the forum to help I found myself scrolling through lots of messages trying figure out exactly what was required from the assignments. Also I know it would be impossible with the amount of people enrolled in the course, but I would be nice to have an opinions from qualified designer/someone in charge of the course. Getting expert opinions on how to improve your work would be nice as a lot of the peer review reviews were a couple word answers or I know for me personally I don't know too much about design to tell someone else how they could enhance their work.

This course is designed well with the novice in mind. Michael Worthington does a good job of teaching it in a distance learning format. I like when the two students made art in the first week intro section--it would be ideal to see a bit more of them or other students.

The only detractor from the course for me was the work of a number other students. It felt like for every legitimate assignment I tried to review, there were two or three assignments that were absolute nonsense. The worst offenders were those who just posted whatever--some unrelated picture or photo. In one case, the student's final poster was a simple red dot. (?!) Why are these people paying to waste their time and mine?

Great course! I enjoyed the peer-review element but the majority of peer submissions were incomplete, plagiarised or not relevant. Most reviewers also had very generic comments on my work, often as though they had not even seen it. Can you please improve this process Coursera!! It’s especially frustrating when you’re giving extra time to review people’s submissions, only to discover there are tons of people on the course who haven’t really done the work and are wasting your time.

On the plus side the course materials and assignments were excellent and really just what I hoped for and needed. Looking forward to the next module in the graphic design specialisation.

The content is very good. Clear and organized. I learned a lot. But the user interface information for submitting assignments was challenging despite mentor 'clarification' which is not clear.

Also, The last assignment instructions need to be rewritten. I saw many interpretations of the parameters causing confusion on peer grading. Luckily I seem to be among those who interpreted as intended but I had to read out 4-5 times before I proceeded and even then I was uncertain. I felt bad for the students who did it wrong. Also the overlap of students who are in a following course we sent out for review. Confusion.

I wish it was a course with an active instructor.

I like this course. However, I would like to work more with color. I also think having the option to collaborate with other students would inspire people more perhaps, maybe just one group project that can be completed either in the group or also alone but the project is required, if that makes sense?! Students could just choose if they wanted to do it alone or with a partner. I found myself wanting to reach out to fellow students and didn't really have the opportunity so if there was some incentive to do so, that would be neat. But overall great course! And the professors accent made it really easy to want to watch his videos and follow along!

Overall the videos and the exercises were great, crafted with care and gave great clarity on what to focus on and how the process works. The building blocks were put on each other really well. My only problem is that the grading system is based on currently enrolled students so feedback is not very professional for the most part, though you can get lucky. Overall I did learn from it so it was useful still: mostly just doing the practices itself. Peer review itself IS a very useful practice, just being graded by each other itself gives very little value to the paper itself.

Great introductory course. This course is great for those interested in getting the basic knowledge of graphic design. However, don't expect super helpful reviews on your work. I try to the best of my ability to critique each fellow students submission and give them tips here and there. But, it is a bit frustrating to get peer reviews that do not have any constructive criticism. Reviews like 'Good job' or 'Meets requirements' are not very helpful.

Also, many people submit blank assignments, so there is nothing to review. But all and all, it was an awesome course.

Really easy-to-understand course, for people who would like to know the very basic things about graphic design. It teaches you he terminologies to build the base of a beginner designer and shows how it can affect different artworks. This course is encouraging you to simply "MAKE DESIGN!" and bring out your inner-creativity, especially through the somewhat open-ended assignments that only require something like Word, or even your pencils at home as the minimum. Definitely recommend it if you're only coming into the graphics design world :)

The course is a nice introduction to Graphics Design for a novice. The teacher is great! I like the reviews from students but some reviews are not very helpful as they are not specific. I would like a teacher or someone with deep knowledge in Graphic Design to review for more constructive reviews. I also think it will be nice to get more than 2 reviews. Maybe the students can be advised on which softwares are best to use for specific projects. Overall, the course is great and fun way to learn. Thank you!