I should suggest my fellow Coursera students not to waste their money and time for this course. You'll learn a lot more than this course has to offer if you consult some websites with screenwriting tutorial blogs, read books and write on your own.

I am a PhD student of theoretical film studies and and a fan of Coursera courses. I was eager to learn screenwriting as an interesting hands-on course. Well, it's project-based alright, but where's the real guidance??

This is a lazily designed course with poor content and almost zero guidance. The videos are very short and feels like a layman is trying to motivate you to write something, that's all. No methods explained other than some terminologies like bible, acts, outline being thrown at you. No examples, no comparisons, no detailed approaches.

Lastly, scriptwriting has a significant difference with other humanities course. Being peer-reviewed doesn't help here -- a total novice can not effectively judge another newbie's work nor give them quality feedback.

The instructor says in the first video: ”you do not need to read a book on how to write a script” – in my opinion YOU DO! Better to read a book or two than waste your time on this course; the videos are extremely short, shallow and a waste of time!

I'm sorry, but I have taken many courses on Coursera and this is, without a doubt, the absolute worst. This isn't minimal teaching, it's practically nonexistent. Frankly, buying a book would at least give more guidance than tossing one-minute 'lectures' out there and having students blindly fend for themselves under the guise of "experimental learning".

Plus, you then have an all or nothing grade system - there is no middle ground, just pass or fail on an assignment that had little to no instruction or examples listed to begin with.

I'm truly surprised that Coursera agreed to allow this course as it is. I suggest that the instructor and team see how other instructors at universities are teaching their Coursera courses. Just because something is free, it doesn't give free reign to be lazy. If I had paid for it, I would have asked for a refund. This entire course needs a serious revamp.

this course will make you write a script... and that's it, if you want to LEARN how to write a script, don't take this course.

This course just push you to write a script without clearly teaching you what to do, if you want to learn, look for another course (I took one from futurelearn.com while in this course, it's free, this one is a waste of money if you pay)

Very disappointing course offering; do not pay, do not audit, just read through the syllabus and move on.

There isn't any real teaching happening. I guess this isn't a course for beginners.

No significant instruction/teaching provided. Appears to function only as a self-directed workshop, which doesn't teach the craft itself. Disappointing.

What a lazy excuse of a course. Why would you call it a course? Just call it "Start Writing" and put it on a blog. No guidance, no tips, no effort whatsoever. Without any guidelines, how does review from a fellow novice help? It's like blind leading the blind.

I'll go with the minimalist style of this course and use just one word to describe it: Rubbish.

Supremely basic and a near total lack of notes. Helpful only if you have zero experience in screen writing.

This is not so much a course as a cut-throat writing incentive. If you're looking for anything beyond the basics of basics, go elsewhere. I think the rapid pace of the course is causing major student drop-offs and disengaged peer reviews. I don't think a total of five people even finished their script during my run. Jan Zurcher, the mentor, is this course's saving grace. He's endlessly patient and very helpful. He will be critical, so use that to become a better writer. This course helped my novel writing as it forces you to take a step back and look at your story's bare bones. It was a lot of fun, but it lacked the writing group kinship I'd hoped for.

Horrible, An instructor that, according to IMDB wrote 4 epidodes of Hollywood Babylon in 1990, knows nothing of how TV is done today, teaches you how to write a pilot for 2022. Not only that, there is no work feedback, just peer review. Right, just what I need, a bunch of wanna-be writers' opinions on something they know nothing about.

I finished 1 week and a half and I can't take it anymore.

Don't waste your time.

The content of the course itself was quite good, pretty well-paced and the advice simple but helpful - I'm quite happy with what came out of it. The one downside, however, is the grading system. I understand there's not really a practical solution to grading the amount of stuff that must be coming through the course, especially for people who are already full-time lecturers, but the current peer-review system is kind of broken.

First the necessity to get 80 for passing an assignment mean that one trolling or mistaken review can force you to retake an assignment - for example, I had to resubmit act 2 because one of the reviewers gave me 0/100, stating I hadn't submitted it, when the reviewer hadn't bothered checking the attached file, and since there were only 3 reviewers it tanked the entire grade.

Second, the fact you know the people you're going to be grading are going to be grading you in return, especially if you're a little ahead of the curve and are constantly getting the same people, means you tend to make your reviews much nicer than they probably should be - I know I've voluntarily neutered some the reviews I gave because I knew the person was going to be among those to grade me.

Third, there's no actual incentive to providing actual feedback. Throughout the first assignment, I gave detailed feedback for every single review I made, usually at least a couple paragraph's worth, and justifying any points I might not have given, and I just abandoned that in week 3 because throughout the entire course the only return I got was one comment saying 'boring dialogues' with no added explanation. Commenting on other people's stuff just felt like a waste of time because I knew they wouldn't bother with mine. Maybe make commenting mandatory when grading ?

Anyway, I still enjoyed the course and the content, it's just that it's left me a little in the dark as to whether I've progressed or not throughout the whole thing, and left me feeling a little wanting on feedback !

I love how this class gave me the motivation to write a pilot episode with the step by step exercices. The teacher is right : the best way to learn how to write is simply to write. However, there is one major flaw that I can't forgive. The assignments are reviewed by incompetent peers who have no idea what they are talking about and the criterias are mostly subjective, making it so many people fail the test because people didn't personally like their project even though it was objectively good. Peer reviews have no value and only ruined the class for me. I wasted money on this class and only hope Coursera will stop peer reviews considering how discouraging they are.

The course is just OK, and limited by the Coursera format in many ways. The biggest problem is the peer-feedback method of grading and advancing. Most peers do not know what is good, what is bad, and are afraid of giving a bad score when they are reliant on others. There should be a separate course on character development before this course. Prof. Wheeler pretends you can write a compelling script about anything that comes to mind. No, you can't. Some exercises with a given set of situations might help, for example "write a scene with two characters, a balcony, and two props - a box of chocolate and one other thing." This would also help learners practice using script formatting. (And update the software recommendations!) Wheeler's comments on script formatting are, arguably, learnable from a book. With the focus on proper formatting this should have been practiced more in the course. As it is, Wheeler's entire teaching can be boiled down to "the 3 act structure is necessary, try really hard to make your act 3 finish in a compelling way." Things the course says are important to success, such as writing groups and table reads, are completely unsupported by the course. How about giving students a sample script and a video of a table read, and then ask the student to critique the script on the basis of what they heard? Nope. The Coursera interface is really bad, or badly used, in this course. You are shown peer submissions in a fixed order, and cannot skip a submission. With peers submitting content in several languages, this is unworkable. Further, you can't copy text out of the submission text box to use Google Translate or similar functions. One learning activity used a tile interface to allow you to pick other peer submissions, but this was only one activity, and probably the most trivial. Because of these problems, you are at the mercy of the random few people who are active in the course at the same time as you are. If they don't review your submission it will languish for months or even years. I reviewed some submissions that were 6 years old in the later weeks of the course. Those folks must have abandoned all hope of completing the course and it wasn't their fault. When you submit, there is an easy to miss "Shareable link" feature. Clicking on this gives you a URL that can be copied and pasted into a message on the discussion forum for that exercise. This is the only way to get the attention of your peers. The Coursera concept, which relies on peer feedback, does not make it easy or obvious how to get peer feedback. Just broken. Submitting comments is much more valuable than scoring with a questionnaire, but the interface made it easy to make a mistake and submit the review without giving comments. These activities should have been separated, and it should have been necessary to give written comments before moving on to the questions. Similarly, the last activity requires submitting two separate documents, the story bible and the complete script. The text box does not preserve script formatting, so that needs to be uploaded. This would have been better handled by separating the activities into two separate tasks - submitting the story bible and submitting the complete script. This would be a less awkward use of Coursera. There is no getting around the fact that writing 30 pages of correctly formatted script that captures a compelling story is incredibly daunting. I don't think 1 in 1,000 learners actually finish the course with the outputs as intended. If you do, congratulations, you've done it on your own, without a lot of help from the instructor, and fighting the interface.

I came to the class as someone who studied film in college, but after going the production route with my career wanted to use the pandemic to sharpen my screenwriting skills. If you are a true beginner (like this class is advertised as) I worry this is the exact thing that would discourage or scare you off from something great. The teacher's instructions are very short and boil down to "just do it" which... yes, and no.

It is an intensive project-centered course, and I know it is free/online, but it gives you so little that the peer-review grades/feedback are meaningless. How are you supposed to peer review on something like formatting or industry best practice if you are a beginner and given no guidance yourself? There are also too many assignments, some of which (again, as someone who majored in this in college and works in the industry) felt like "busy work" that doesn't reflect real-world practices. For the script itself, it's almost impossible to complete an assignment and receive enough feedback in time to influence the next step in the writing process.

I think due to the issues I mentioned, most people fall behind or give up entirely. I am writing this in September 2021, and the last assignment I peer-reviewed had a submission from summer 2020 still waiting for feedback. If you are expecting a writers' room/group vibe: DON'T.

If you are interested in learning Script Writing: check out some screenwriting books from the library, look at blogs, Google the script of your favorite movie/show as a reference, maybe look for a writers' group in your own community. Set your own deadlines if you need that motivation, and then write. You don't need this class or professor to make you feel like a failure for trying.

Excellent course. The lectures are very short and to the point but they provide enough for you to start doing the most important thing of all - getting an idea down to paper and writing and writing and writing. The course does require a significant investment of time and energy - but if you provide that, you are the ultimate beneficiary as this is very much learning by doing. The peer feedback system provides and interesting opportunity to see what other members of the class are doing but unfortunately most peers do not provide much quality feedback on the work you submit. Having said that, I requested feedback from one of the course mentors and I was blown away by the depth and quality of the feedback that he provided on my final submission. This was my first Coursera course and I feel very happy with the final outcome.

This is a hands-on course. We can keep reading and studying writing books until we are blue in the face. But eventually writers have to write. It is a heavy schedule but once you have done it - you prove to yourself - that you can do it. No time to procrastinate on this one. I like the professor's style - he doesn't pussy foot around - he tells it as it is - just do it. I got so much out of this I ended up paying for it - it was well worth it. Having work reviewed by other students is excellent - you get a mixed bag of reviews - just like the reviews of your TV Series. The course is not live - although a course mentor answers questions posted to the discussion forums. The construction of the training has been well thought out - there area few areas when it could improve - but overall - it was a great experience.

This was my first writing course and trust me when I say, I wasn't disappointed. In this course, I experienced and learned so much from David. These learnings weren't just about techniques and methodologies, they pushed me to look deeper into myself and the writer I want to be. Regardless of whether or not I ever have a book, script, play or poem published, I will write and continue writing because I write for me. I write because of the peace, joy and challenges writing offers. I write because I can and I write because I ENJOY it.... Thank you David for encouraging me to "Just Write!"

Robert Garlington

Exceptional!

Have no time to currently complete; will cancel and start over next year. Don't care about certificate but believe course deserves payment so will cheerfully pay once again.

I loved this course, it was eye opening for me. I've always loved writing but I've never studied it. taking this course helped me explore my writing more.

I totally recommend it to anyone!

I enjoyed taking the course because I really need deadlines in order to complete writing assignments. However, the class doesn't do much to concretely help you be a better writer or get to that finish line with skill. If I hadn't studied screenwriting already, I don't think I would've had a clue of what a TV script is supposed to look like, how to create characters, plot points, etc. The 90-second video instructions for what each act should include are vague. The approach that you can't read books to learn how to write also means that are no resources given as guidance. I like that there's a peer review requirement, but people rarely left feedback. It would've been nice if collaboration was somehow mandatory.

Never felt engaged in this course

Such a great course. Jumping in and just doing it worked for me, as I tend to spend time reading up and educating myself theoretically before ever getting around to actually writing. Seeing sample scripts and discussions of form and writing criteria is definitely important, as I have managed to learn a lot through looking at many scripts and comparing, so I think there's a place for that in the course, but the actual project base was what really made the difference for me. The grading criteria points with every assignment have functioned as vital checklists in which to review not just my peers, but also my own work as well. I really learned a whole lot more about stretching my limits and what I am capable of doing by actually writing than just by dreaming of doing it one day. My confidence is at an all-time high, and now I am actively revising the pilot and working on the following episodes, as well as actively seeking opportunities for further courses, contests, and screenwriter communities and associations. Thank you, David. Before this course, I never actually thought I'd do it, and decided to sign up on a whim because I love writing and I love film and TV, but I never even considered screenwriting as a career or an option, and now this has all been changed. I am forever grateful. Please come back and give more courses on the different facets of writing for the screen, like developing compelling characters, world building, genre tips, etc. Your support has been phenomenal. Thanks to Michigan State University, Coursera, and all of my peers for the amazing encouragement and support.

It has been a wonderful experience working on this project. This was my first attempt at scriptwriting and I learned so much, coming in terms with concepts I was unaware of before. Also, being a girl who procastinate a lot, this course brought out a completely different side of me as I was completing my assignments before deadline for five weeks. Plus, I've come across so many talented writers while reviewing their works which enlightened me of the abundant creative talent in this field as well, whose reviews also helped me improve my writing.

Lastly, thank you coursera, my mentors, and my peers who helped me in completing this course as I was not sure at the very beginning whether I will be able to make it till the end or not. Thanks to all of you for making it possible.

Hello! I really liked the course and I am surprised that everything worked out. I finished the pilot! Thank you very much for your work. The only thing I didn’t like was the questions for the reviewers: “Do you like the script and do you want to read / look further?” and the estimates themselves. And assessment and performance of work depends on this. Questions of this kind do not help to improve the project, but upset and reduce self-esteem. Personally, I was very upset and almost dropped off course. It was hard to get back. People’s tastes are different and you can’t please everyone. Moreover, we live in different countries and we have different living conditions. Otherwise, everything is wonderful. I hope that I will have time to finish another David course. Hooray!