I enjoyed the course immensely. Excellent course material, and an outstanding instructor make the "Initiating and Planning Projects" course rock. Bonus videos are a treat and and filled with practical advice and wisdom. You can be confident that this course is a great value add, and a wise investment of your time and effort. If you are studying with your PMP exam in mind, then you now know where to look.

Margaret Meloni, MBA, PMP, the instructor for this course was phenomenal. I learned so much from the content because of her methodology for presenting concepts. The course was well organized, which made it easier to comprehend and apply the objectives. As a result, I felt very comfortable taking other courses in the specialization after completing this first course. Thank you Margaret Meloni!

Comparing the other courses, this course is very accurate and target-specific. It helped me to understand the project management theoretically and also made me realize how challenging it is by the real examples. I loved all parts but my favorite part is the week 6 which includes the panelists, because they are the real mentors for a new beginner project manager. I am thankful for this course.

The course kicked my behind at first YET I instantly realized I have been doing most of what they were teaching for years. I flew by each course with flashing colors, once I realized the structure. Everything is very well taught that even someone who has been out of college for years can pick back up quickly. Just take your time folks and study and you will pass. Thank you all so much

Very efficient and knowledgeable courese with better explanaion and clearity, i feel thankful to this course to provide me an opportunity to explore such a valuable subject which matter alot to me and will definately help me in my upcomming future.

Especial thanks to lecturares who made this things easy andexplan with much more clear and in simple way of understanding, THANK YOU .

a big WOW to Margaret Meloni's style of instructions!

I've tried taking a few online project management course but lost the interest half way, I am determined to complete this one,due to her simple approach of explaining the concepts related,very clear and precise.

My understanding about the project management gets better after listening to her lectures.

Keep up the good work!

If you're looking to brush up or learn some project management fundamentals and learn a little about the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), then I recommend this course for you. If you already have some experience and confidence as a project manager, then this course may be too fundamental for you. This course covers a lot of the material from the "initiating" and "planning" stages of the PMBOK guide. There's also a good section on authority vs. influencing and managing conflict. The professor is great. I would be interested in some more involved exercises or projects though, as the exercises are more so just a reflection question accompanying each week's lesson. The class may be significantly enhanced by the optional reading, but, having not purchased those books, I can't say.

The course is well prepared, thought through, coherent and structured in a way that it supports the content.

However, it felt very much like being in an advertisement program for PMBOK. This feeling was supported by the unavailability of all course materials.

Throughout the course the PMBOK guide was included as the suggested reading. The PMBOK materials were featured in each and every lecture and the guidebook was extensively presented and recommended in an extra video. This gives the impression that the course content cannot be sufficiently understood without this literature. Therefore, I would expect the specific recommend chapters to be made available for the participants of the course, especially since this is a paid course.

This course packed a lot in and was very direct and efficient, giving helpful examples to illustrate the points. The project management tools learned can be applied in so many situations even for those of us who will never have the official title of "project manager". Videos are supplemented by flash lessons that go over the information, which was great for learners who may not learn as well by video alone. I would have liked one or two written assignments, but quizzes were relevant to the information provided and it was nice not to have to wait on peer-reviews. Overall, a great course.

That was really good and useful for me. The lector is great and the 'homework' really deep. But here are 2 problems for me:

1. For me (I'm not a native Englishman) "homework" were not a 10-minutes light walk. I'm not against long and hard working, but I still think that the time which shown as "normal" for doing this work isn't truly and honestly make.

2. That was disappointing to see the last final exam in form of compilation of previous. That upset me a bit and make this course easier as I think.

But summary the course worth this time and cost.

All information is relevant and useful. However, there are two points I would like mention.

1-The lecture part should be more dynamic because it contains a lot of definitions and data. I find it really hard to focus in all that content; I needed to take many notes and sometimes re-read pages in order to get and understand what it is explained.

2-The activity part where you have to think about your actual projects, should be checked by a tutor or someone who can tell you if your assessment is correct, I think this is part of the learning curve.

Good introduction to project management basics. Deals with the definition of a project and introduces the student to a set of formal ways to document things to consider when starting a project, e.g. scope, stakeholders and responsibility assignments. It is on times a little bit too theoretical for my taste. There are some small case study videos that are well done. Could be a little bit more hands-on.

I still enjoyed it, learned a lot and will continue with the second course in this series.

Russian language is stated but some videos do not have subtitles in Russian. And the presentation is copy-protected, so it can't be translated into your own language either. It is also very difficult to find the theoretical materials on which the course is based in an online format in your own language. In General, the course is interesting and very practice-oriented, but training videos alone are not enough, you need to study theory.

Overall, the course was good. It offered recorded sessions, examples, case studies, control questions during lessons, and a summary of key principles as extracted from the PMBOK guide. However, it could benefit from having more of the former four items, which should satisfy the need for explanations and application of knowledge. The final exam had some questions repeating from previous quizzes, which can also be avoided.

I like the teacher a lot, I think she speaks very clearly and is very animated. The video/content is very fast though, which doesn't allow a lot of time to take notes. I feel the videos should give a high level overview of the reading, but I noticed that the readings sometime have a lot of important topics that the videos does not mention at all, so it's really important to read the accompanying materials carefully.

I feel so blessed that I was able to complete my first online course and achieving such certifcate. I am looking forward to completing my certificate and building a professional career. I reviewed the course with 4 stars as I think that the reading parts were a bit boring and confusing despite what it has as a variety of information. I am looking forward to finding a simplier yet an informative reading articles.

I liked everything about this course except that some of the lesson materials couldn't be viewed on my iPad as they were flash based. Other than that, the videos were good - not too long, not too short - and the quizzes were suitably based on what was discussed beforehand in the lectures and lessons. I also picked up one of the recommended readings "Fast Forward MBA in Project Management" which I also liked.

The course is great but can't give 5 stars because the times for completion are lazily derived. For instance, every lesson that has slides is allocated 10 minutes, but some may contain 40 slides, meaning you only get 15 seconds for each slide! There's no way!!!

People learning online are often very schedule sensitive so it would be good to at least use accurate estimates of time required.

Very great course offering the basic introduction to project management that anyone can easily understand even if they have no experience! The lectures were very useful and were supplemented with case studies and other interactive lessons. I just wish there were assignments attached to the course rather than just using quizzes to check your understanding. Very excellent course overall!

I like the videos and structure, but the assignments here are very weak--would be much more effective and useful to work with actual case studies. Simply asking us to 'think of some projects' makes it much more difficult to map the learnings to real-world problems. I'd strongly suggest using examples, like in the case study videos, so that we can really properly think it through.

Course goes over the most basic points, but also allows you (if you are interested) to dive much deeper into the content. Seems it has everything any project manager would want, so definitely worth taking. Would have wanted the questions to be a little more difficult and potentially more questions to help make sure the information was retained. Overall a great course.

I enjoyed this course very much, it was lengthy and had a breadth of knowledge that I can use in my journey as a PM. The speaker Margaret Meloni ,had a pleasant demeanor and was easy to follow. The one thing I enjoyed the most was the 3 panelist interview that was shared atthe end of this course, it was refreshing to hear valuable feedback from others in the field.

I wouldn't mind having a concrete Project that will follow me from the start (week 1 - course 1) to the finish (week 6 - course 4), specially when it comes to the assignments (which could include quizes, "real life problems", brain storming and what not). I think that would definitely make the (whole) path of these 4 courses more interesting and more valuable.

Course content is well-structured and good references are given.

What can be improved is that I want to see how these skills can be applied in real life situations. It'd be great if discussion session can be organized by Coursera, basically coordinate students to form discussion groups and meet at least once a week to discuss the topics covered that week.

I currently have my PMP certification, but I needed PDUs to renew my certificate. I completed the Project Management Principles and Practices specialization from UCI to achieve the 35 PDUs, but I wasn't pleased with the course overall and had significant issues with the Capstone Project. The three courses included in the Project Management Principles and Practices specialization provide a practical introduction to Project Management. The Professors also discusses problems faced in actual prior projects (i.e. it's not theoretical), how to approach those problems and best practices, which was great.

From my perspective, however, there were a lot of problems with the course:

1. It's not comprehensive. It glosses over a lot of items and unless you are either already familiar with project management applications and/or complete all the supplemental reading, it doesn't entirely prepare you for the capstone project.

2. This is absolutely NOT the course to take if you are looking to understand project management principles to pass the PMP exam. Key components of the exam are only included in the slide decks - and even there are glossed over. So even though you will get the credit to sit for the exam, you will in no way be prepared for the exam. Instead, UCI encourages you to sign up for another course. This might seem like an unfair comment, but recognize that I took one $25 course on another online learning platform that provided me with 80% of what I needed to sit for the exam. I think this should be disclosed upfront in the FAQs to avoid confusion.

3. I was infuriated by my so called peers in the Capstone Project. Of the 8 assignments I reviewed between the practice and final peer review assignments, only ONE met the criteria. There was another which provided a good high level start to the project, but was missing a lot of the details. In general, you could tell people didn't want to invest the time and effort into the capstone project. They simply wanted to complete the bare minimum (if that) in order to get the certificate. I also can't tell you how many submissions I had to flag for spam - and even outright plagirized content. You need to do the work; if you don't want to, you shouldn't take this course.

4. I also encountered difficulty posting my certificate to the PMI (Project Management Institute) website. I wish the Provider ID were on the certificate and the name of the course exactly matched what was in their directly. I almost selected the wrong course, which would have given me fewer PDUs

As a result, I would not recommend this course, except to those who are curious to learn more about project management - but not necessarily wanting to sit for the exam.