bhawna

GOOD

good

good

.

The course is very interesting and the material discussed is all essential knowledge for doing research in the field of social sciences. I also really appreciate the extra material that the teachers offered, the interesting interviews in particular, which presents the student with the perspective of scientists conducting research in the field.

However, the amount of work required for completing the course is significantly above that mentioned in the course description, or at least in one takes the final assignments seriously.

Another problem I had was with understanding the questions of several final assignments and of the final exam. I have a master in cognitive science, one in analytic philosophy, and I am at the final stage of my PhD in philosophy. I have studied my masters in English, and I am writing my PhD thesis in English. Yet, many questions really puzzled me, including the questions regarding the philosophical content of the course.

Given the difficulties I encountered, I wonder whether this course would be really suitable to undergraduates.

Despite that, I am happy to have completed the course and I recognize that I learned a lot during the course. Despite the final assignments requiring more work than I had planned, I had a lot of fun doing them. Furthermore, I really appreciate the teachers' effort (and I believe quite some was needed) to design this course and to offer students more than it was required to provide them with some basic knowledge.

I really enjoyed the course content and its organisation. It’s clearly a really well-made online course. Carefully put together.

Videos and explanations are easy to understand, even with the hardest subjects. The interviews were a nice “breather” between topics. And the assignments varied on difficulty, but all of them were, in my opinion, valuable and helpful in the learning process. I enjoyed the studying process so much I recommended a couple of friends whilst I was doing it.

But I have to say how frustrating and disappointing the grading system was. The peer evaluation is a nice tool and it helps students with their critical analysis, but the completion of the course shouldn’t depend on it.

I personally needed the course certificate for a university application and therefore, worked day and night to complete it during my first month. Also because I couldn’t really afford to pay the second month.

I finished it a few days in advance, but couldn’t receive the certificate in time because there was no grading on my assignments. The final grade needed was received a couple of hours after my credit card was charged for the next month. In the end, I missed the deadline and was charged for an extra month I absolutely didn’t need - as I have already completed all my activities in the previous month.

I’m sad to say that even with such good content, in the end, my experience was negative due to the unfairness of its system.

The course content is great. The lectures and materials are good as well. However, the peer review assignment is more than terrible. The idea of collaborative learning is awesome, but pursing which requires certain checking and supporting mechanisms. There is no quality control of the review system. Plagiarism is prevalent!!! I don't understand how people just copy-n-past the same thing and submit as their own work? This happens every week, and people copied the exact same works. I was shocked reading several identical submissions in a row. Such actions of ACADEMIC DISHONESTY should NOT BE TOLERATED. Another huge problem, relating to peer-review, is the discussion forum. There is almost no discussion about the course content. I thought the purpose of forum is to clarify confusion through discussions. But it turns out to be a place to post one's work requesting for review. It's okay for sure, but this should not be the main function of the forum. Thus, overall, unfortunately, I feel that the disfunction of the discussion forum and the lack of countering mechanism against plagiarism tarnished this wonderful course.

Some of the information provided as fact in this course was questionable. One comment that particularly stood out in a video was that "depressions tend to often go away on their own". As a social worker, that is entirely untrue. Also the assignment layout for Week 6 was not reviewed properly and had a slew of incorrect information leading my completion of this class to be delayed by an incorrect statement that an assignment was optional.

However, I did appreciate that consistent examples within each week to help understand that material better rather than several different examples and trying to figure out how they match up. The visuals were helpful as well.

The actual educational value of this course is quite high. The score I can offer it in good faith is dragged down by the additional "assignments" like "Write you own quiz question!" and the expectation to review the quiz questions thought up by other students. Such things in a scientific course are unnecessary and may actually be counterproductive because of the reliance upon other students and their grasp of the material. If they are to remain part of this course, they really should be treated as supplementary and not required to complete the course. It really detracts from the experience for those of us who come here to learn and not to socialize.

The course is good, although some things bothered me a lot: 1) The peer review is just horrible. I've been plagiarized 3 times during this course, it takes a lot of time to wait for other students' assignments to be ready for evaluation and most of the time the evaluations received follow a random pattern. 2) the examples and the knowledge are mainly for Psychology. Don't be fooled, it says Social Sciences, but 90% of the examples or the subjects is about Psychology. If you want to have real examples of Economis, Political Science or International Relations, you won't find them here. I suggest changing the title of the course to address this issue.

The course material was beautiful and compact. Before this, I completed the Qualitative methods course and really enjoyed Moerman's mode of teaching. Being inspired I attempted this one but sorry to say that I have not enjoyed the course at all. The teaching-learning activity is so boring and fast that I lose my interest in the study the course. I also got very limited scope of learning through the assignments. Everything would be fine if the teacher's delivery would be slight slow and give time to comprehend the lecture matter.

Course materials are great. I really enjoyed the videos and found the assignments engaging. I'm only giving 3 stars, however, because the peer review system is disappointing. Lots of people are not properly submitting or reviewing and it really impacts the experience of taking this course. The forums are also pretty useless because they're filled with people asking for reviews on their assignments. I think this course could benefit from a bit more ongoing moderation from staff.

The course materials are great, but the peer review system for assignments does not work for me. Most people just give perfect grades to everyone, and the quality of the assignment doesn't matter. Forums are also not used for anything other than students asking for good reviews of their work, so there isn't really a spirit of learning from each other. This impacts on my personal learning as I do not know whether my assignments were actually correct.

It's good, but the lack of interaction with professors weakens the quality of learning. Fellow students are mostly not up to the level for peer reviews, so feedback is mostly extremely weak, and content discussions are virtually inexistent. Also, many participants seem to copy and cheat, which decreases credibility of the program. It would be better if we could have direct access to professors to clear out doubts and debate learning topics.

It was a well and clearly structured course. Although rich in content, it was enjoyable and useful to complete.

However, the course is missing a contingency plan in case somebody fails a session. Since assessments are peer reviewed, I do not see the motivation of my peers to come back and grade me again - which means I cannot complete the course on time despite, being on time with all assignments.

While some of this course was useful, there are some issues I have with it. The first week, a philosophical history, had little to do with the material I wanted to learn. The rest seems focussed on teaching definitions, rather than truly explaining concepts. I would have preferred a structure that enabled practice of concepts, rather than definition regurgitation.

This course has very clear videos. However, a lot of information is intensely put in these videos without any seminars etc. so this will certainly not be an equivalent of a real course at a university.

Of course there are forums but the teachers are never involved in those and do not really respond to any questions or feedback.

Course content is good. The presentation is very good; transcript and video. however the delivery is poor. There seems to be a lack of administration and the peer reviews diminish the quality of the course due to people just passing any level of content.

This course layout is not well. It is very deceiving (especially the final exam). Social Research means socail change. This is not a soft science. This is a Hard science and let's treat it as such.

mechanically it worked pretty well. just a little hard to figger out what's going on and what's important. what needs to be memorized and what just needs to be understood . . .

The course was okay, the assignments and final quiz don't really reflect the material properly and need to be re-evaluated and rephrased to be clearer

Great course, difficult information to learn. Maybe add more interactive activities during the lectures.

Just three stars so far, I've just started the course late... I think it looks good tho.

very good course, but I never recieved the feedback I needed on the forum