Seems like the patients are running the asylum in these Wesleyan/Coursera courses. The feedback is only useful when the students provide careful, thoughtful readings, which happens occasionally. If you're one of the students who commit to reading your fellow students' work carefully and thoughtfully, and work hard to communicate your impressions, you'll feel cheated when you get in return: "Interesting story. Use all your senses. More dialogue." Do any of the teachers of the courses actually read what the people taking this course are writing? I feel like it all runs on autopilot and no one really cares. Frustrating.

It would be better if the instructor actually participated.

The most important part of this course is peer review IMHO. So, I put a lot of effort and consideration into the reviews I gave, trying to make them helpful, constructive and encouraging. But it was not very reciprocal. I DID get a few great reviews, very thoughtful, very constructive. But sometimes I only got two reviews instead of three, and usually the reviews gave no criticism. One review was a single word, "nice." I got a LOT more out of the other courses in this certificate. I was disappointed with this one.

I was under the impression we would receive feedback from a qualified lecture in the Capstone, which we unfortunately did not. I also only received 2 reviews on the first draft and on the second draft (rather than the 3 we were supposed to receive). I feel that a big failing of the course in general is that you can't correspond with the people who review your work, unless they leave a comment. The lecturers drive home that it's critical to have a group of trusted writing friends to review your work and support you. I felt that some of the reviewers could have become great writing buddies in future (their feedback was so insightful), but I'll never be able to interact with them. I felt that the courses leading up to the Capstone were more informative, although suffering the same administrative problems.

I recently completed the 5-course specialization in creative writing. For the most part the course material presented was good, especially the courses on plot, on setting, and on style. The course on characterization was a little vague. From the syllabus, it looked like it would be a good course, but the instructor did not follow the syllabus and was often very unfocussed in her presentation.

The weakness with this specialization is that all the feedback to the writer is provided by peers in the course. This I found very disappointing. Many of the other students were honestly very poor writers, and as a result, the feedback I received on my assignments was very superficial. In addition, rather than being able to learn from reading the writing of others, I found for the most part that the pieces submitted by others were very lacking.

If you take this course, know that it will provide you some good information about writing fiction, but the feedback you receive on your assignments will not help you learn. You will need to find another peer group of writers to help you with that.

I learned a lot from the exercises in the other parts of the specialization. To make the capstone a better experience for everyone I propose that here the reviews should be graded. Perhaps, only have each person do two reviews instead of three but have them submitted as part of the next week's assignment and rated. Everyone could rate two or three reviews. This way reviewers would put in as much effort into the reviews as into their submissions, and they would also learn how to write reviews by reading other reviews and sanding examples.

The quality of this course does not match at all that of the previous courses (The Craft of Plot, of Character, etc). The information provided by instructors is repetitive and except for few exceptions, not really useful.

The fact that all the work is peer-evaluated is what makes this all an almost trivial exercise. Few fellow students take the task seriously enough. Sometimes the reviews are just "ok" or "..." which is not really helpful, especially if you are honestly invested in acquiring the new skill.

Some students enrol "en masse" and don't make serious submissions, either (they submit blank pages or lorem ipsum), hoping for their fellows to grade them well, even if they don't deserve it.

It's a shame, because all aspiring writers could really use good reviews as learning tools. It's not happening.

This course pushed me to the next level in writing. Especially the capstone project where everything came together in one big story, helped me a lot.Everything we'd learned was applied and for the first time ever did I understand how workshopping and sanding alters a text to the better.

I just wanted to thank everyone who helped me with their feedback. In March 2021, I published my capstone project on Amazon. I wrote “The Marvelous Misfits of Westminster” (https://amzn.to/3sCfOLp) in November 2020 during this course and I am still blown away how well it turned out.

I also started my own blog about my writing process: www.thestorytobe.com

This creative writing course really helped me a lot and changed my writing for the better. I'm definitely closer to being a writer now.

Content from Wesleyan was really very good. The four main faculty were excellent across all five modules including the Capstone.

Platform from Coursera makes it far to easy for other 'students' to cheat, but giving one word (or one letter!) feedback reviews. My entire Capstone submission, a 15 page pdf, was presented back to me for review by another 'student' who had stolen it - the pdf still showed my name on the property details! Coursera's response is for me to flag/report it, which seems lame. They need to take some simple steps to actually deal with people like this - it's not hard. E.g. allow students to flag a piece of substandard or joke feedback, and for submissions to be better protected. Easy, really, if Coursera invested in improving its platform.

The skills that lead up to this course are extremely helpful. However, no one monitors the peer reviews. After completing a short story first draft and reviewing three other stories (as per the grading requirement), I got one review. Instead of a well, thoughout-out answer, the peer wrote "d" in the text block so that they would receive a passing grade for reviewing others.

There is no way to reach out to anyone to fix this. In the discussion forms, you are directed to go to Scribophile to review/have your story reviewed. But why would I go to another site and review more assignments when I am paying for this course and putting the work into it?

If this class was monitored to some degee, I would probably rate this class higher, but until then, I do NOT recommend it.

The course has been amazing. I was disappointed with the lack of effort made by students to critique my final draft. The critique is supposed to be a 1-2 page effort. I made sure that I obliged for all other students and did a 'proper' job. This is my only complaint. I noticed on my sanding critique there was only one person who bothered to do it correctly.

I would give this five stars for the instructors and videos. I appreciated the assignments and completed a 15-page story. The problem is there are a LOT of students here who seem to not be here to learn how to write a short story and that feels unsafe (as in, are they stealing assignments for classes they're taking elsewhere or hacking something)? With my first assignment, my feedback (which was supposed to be two pages) was "good," "okay," and one semi-helpful paragraph. The assignments I critiqued were blank pages and one 2 paragraph review of a hotel in the Philippines. With my sanding assignment, I got one person who said she couldn't critique me because she didn't speak English and 2 others who wrote one letter and failed me. I resubmitted, including a statement to just move on if the reader didn't want to participate or to provide feedback if they thought I didn't pass. Allow me to quote my feedback, "q," "nc," and "d." Super helpful... I'm not submitting the final, because it just feels like the risk of exposing all my work with no benefit. I also deleted my previous assignment.

I did use the discount to sign up for scribophile. If you're serious about writing, reading others work, giving and receiving feedback, I suggest doing that instead.

For Coursera, I would suggest: 1. students cannot be anonymous (that's where the lack of work and feedback seems to come from) 2. program will not allow feedback or assignments to be submitted unless it meets certain criteria, like word count with non-repeating actual words and 3. feedback is also graded. 4. Students cannot move on in the program unless they get passing grades on assignments and feedback. I'm guessing that whomever is in here doing that isn't paying for a subscription, so I'd also suggested dropping and blocking students who are just in here messing around.

I don't know why anyone is signing up for this and wasting everyone's time, but whatever the reason, Coursera needs to figure out how to manage that problem. It's not that other students are learning and just trying to do their best, but they are actively ruining it for others.

Peers aren't well read.

I wasn't really sure how to rate this. I genuinely really enjoyed all the actual course material, so well done to the teachers. However, the peer reviewing was a total farce by the end. For the later submissions you were lucky to get even one review that wasn't a single letter or some bizarre cut and paste that had nothing to do with anything. As the feedback is one of the most appealing features about this program, this was very frustrating. Coursera needs to get on top of it.

Sorry but the variable "peer" reviews ruined this course for me, I either did not get enough reviews or a "prankster" would down mark for whatever reason they had in their head at that particular moment. the staff don't seem interested in this a a problem. and there is no way to rate a bad reviewer so they get away with it.

the other courses in the specialisation are great, but this one gives very little in the way of tuition and relies on the whole on peers, which for me didn't work out too well

This course pushes you to get your story out and gives you the experience of having your work reviewed and receiving feedback. It could be invaluable to new writers. Only four stars because there is no surety your peers will do a proper review.

The course content is excellent. I really learned a lot, and it is well structured. HOWEVER, there is no instructor feedback, there is only student feedback on your writing, and most of that is very poor. Feedback on final projects were suppose to be 1-2 pages, which I did. The feed back I received was OK, OK and Good Job. Very very disappointed in the feedback, which is a very important part of the course.

The quality of the individual pieces submitted for peer review varied wildly. Those written by authors whose first language is not English were sometimes indecipherable. If an author is committed to writing in English, I think a suggestion should at least be made to have the story pre-reviewed by a native English speaker. The review process itself is flawed. It was unclear where one should post remarks, whether in the box on the grading panel or in the comments to the author. I didn't know whether the author would see my comments, so I ended up posting in both places. It would have been a big help and saved a lot of time if it had been possible to submit inline critique in the form of a word document or pdf document to be uploaded or directly on the page. The review process wasn't very helpful to me, because most of the time I didn't receive any critique of the content and elements we learned and no concrete suggestions for the improvement of my piece, only the grade.

I thought the videos were helpful on the whole. Live classes would be more helpful, though this would probably be a logistical nightmare and have to cost a lot more than the present format. As far as cost is concerned, for personal reasons, I kept having to postpone finishing up the Capstone project, so in the end I had to pay again, which didn't seem very fair. Why should my original payment expire? I'm fairly sure my being there in the background wasn't costing anybody much money. On the other hand, on my salary, paying an extra $79 dollars to get the certificate was quite steep for what I actually got out of it.

The instructor videos and interviews were excellent. However, the critiques of other students is useless if they don't take the course seriously. Most of the time, the critiques I got were an "okay," "good," or just a letter, such as q, l, or k. If you're not going to bother to take this course seriously, don't take it.

All my teachers and some of my classmates were exceptional. I really learned from them.

I believe there should be a mechanism where we can report the names of people who give crappy reviews - just writing good and not explaining why it's good or more often than not would not review your work but write you to review their work. Several did not even write anything at all. These students should be a) be reprimanded and given a warning b)given a second chance and 3) be booted out.

I had several reviewers who did NOT read my story carefully and gave me a negative review when in fact, all that they needed were right below their noses. They're just reading perfunctorily. It's something that dismayed, annoyed me.

I had somebody who copied my work. I reported that. There was also somebody who plagiarized the same work I just reviewed.

And some gave me glowing remarks, praised my efforts, and congratulated me for works done well.

There were also those who I learned a lot from when they told me NOT to use jargon but instead to focus on my emotions which simply means that I need to connect, connect, connect to my readers. And some got to see my funny bone. They made me happy.

Altogether I am one grateful student.

Forever thankful to Coursera, DOST Caraga, and the Giver of It All - Our Almighty God.

I finished this program, was invited to Mentor for one of the specializations, so let my capstone story set for a while ... then spent the last month polishing pages ... and submitted this afternoon to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, one of the few 'pulps' left for short story writers of crime and mystery. Win, Lose, or Draw (Accept, Reject, or ReWrite) I NEVER would have gotten this far without the class and some excellent feedback from classmates. If you're ever planning on "finishing that story" and having others read it, this class is for you!

I found the information itself very useful, but the critique process is plagued by bots and people not actually participating. It's not a deal braker but makes the process frustrating.

I really enjoyed the capstone. I received some great feedback regarding my story but I was disappointed because most time I only received two instead of three reviews. I feel the reviews are the most informative because they are the reader responses to the lessons covered each week so I think it should be a goal that is met each week even if a mentor must step in to provide that final review.

The reviews are also an opportunity for me as a writer to improve my editing skills. It is also an opportunity that forces me to make sure there is a positive in the critical reviews of the pieces. I make sure i review my words to be sure they are not negative but offer guidance and words that will make the writers want to continue writing and improve. As students we all came to this specialization for skills and a chance to publicly share those lessons within our pieces not negativity.

I am glad Coursera provided me with this opportunity to take advantage of this specialization because I am a better writer because of these five courses and their instructors. Thank you.

Overall, I found this course to be VERY ENJOYABLE. My ONLY concern was that the PDF requirement was not stressed at the very beginning of the course. Because I have only an old refurbished computer that does not have top of the line features, making PDF files did not always work as planned. OpenOffice and Adobe Acrobat sometimes easily converted to PDF for submissions, but sometimes did NOT. That made it difficult for some reviewers to open. Had I known earlier, I would have bought a new computer and avoided some frustrating submission difficulties. I really appreciate the effort some people had to go through to open my odd submissions. They gave me some valuable tips in their critiques that I might have missed out on had they not persisted. SO: Suggest at the outset that writers using paleolithic equipment like mine, check to see if their computers can generate PDF files. It will eliminate a lot of cussing later on.

Other than THAT, I had a great time, learned a lot, and HIGHLY recommend the program. Wonderful teachers!

~Jack Hayes

This whole specialization is wonderful, but I am genuinely sad for the amount of nonsense submissions (literal one-word submissions, or perhaps worse: a meme) that are in this specialization. People can actually learn truly fantastic things about writing from this course (I certainly have learned a lot!), but at the same time I feel I would have benefitted more from participating at the in-person course at the Wesleyan University. The online course just isn't the enormous thrill (in regards to reviews) the in-person course seems to be. I have done my very best at reviewing, carefully and thoroughly. Only on very few occasions during this course have I seen anyone do more than very limited effort in reviewing properly. But yes, I have learned a lot. It's a super fun course, just don't do it for the reviews you might be getting. Do it for the things you will learn!