What is it like to take a Coursera course?

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Manan Shah

Taking a Coursera course is a wonderful experience that I recommend wholeheartedly. In order to enjoy a course, however, you have to be fully committed to the lectures, review material, quizzes, and must be interested in the topic.

I have taken multiple Coursera courses, in topics related to Machine Learning, Physics, and Human Physiology, and have found each and every one of them invigorating and useful. Initially, I began signing up for multiple courses in topics that I enjoyed, but I soon realized the difficulty in keeping up with all of the lectures, assignments, coursework, and quizzes. Dropping courses was a tough decision to make, but one that was necessary in order to ensure maximum efficiency in those that I was most interested in.

After I had selected my main three courses (one in each of the above topics), I set out to master the topics. Although each of the video lectures were only about 20-30 minutes long (that's about one third of my regular class time), they were packed with material and content being taught by college professors. In order to ensure that I retained all of the material, I reviewed the transcripts and did the assignments that were posed on the class page. These resources truly helped my learning experience, and enhanced my knowledge on the topics being taught.

As time progressed, taking quizzes and tests became more challenging, and the material became more complex. Fortunately, the teaching in the video lectures as well as the handouts provided in class continued to help me proceed learning. Taking three courses became much harder, especially due to the commitment of being a full-time student, but I was able to manage.

The final exams for each of these courses varied both in difficulty and format. I found it useful to take notes during the lectures and to keep reviewing old material- this helped me review the basic concepts. In the courses I have taken, the final exam was 100 multiple-choice questions, and was based on the material that was covered throughout the class time. The exam was a great conclusion to end the course, and helped solidify the material that we discussed.

Coursera is definitely a wonderful resource for learning, reviewing, and discussing academia. It comes bundled with multiple different resources, including a Wiki page for extra resources, and a Forum where classmates can ask one another for clarification of points discussed in the video and create study groups to review and learn. Although Coursera does have its glitches, it is hands-down the best resource of academic, high-level material that I have encountered. The structured format, open resources, discussion page, and testing all make the website a wonderful place to attain knowledge.

Overall, a Coursera course includes:

• An introduction/syllabus and a basic outline of materials the course will discuss.
• A set of lectures, ranging anywhere from 3-6 videos, that are each 20-30 minutes each which introduce concepts and basic problems. Students are encouraged to discuss difficulties in the Forum.
• A problem set/assignment/quiz that you are required to submit that reinforces the material introduced in the videos. Some courses allow discussion in the Forum regarding these topics, others do not.
• Your assignment grade will be given to you the following week, and a new set of lectures are released. The same process is repeated again.
• At the end of the course (usually 8-10 weeks), a Final exam is given. These exams are flexible (you can take the exam in a certain range of days), and count towards the final grade alongside quizzes, tests, and problem sets.

If you are interested in taking a Coursera course, my advice is as follows.

• Pick the right course. This is crucially important- in order for you to maximize learning and enjoyment, it is necessary for you to pick a course you both enjoy and know you will get a lot out of.
  
• Spend time on the course. Think of the course not as a recreational activity, but like a class in school. Like any regular class, courses require concentration, review, and studying.
  
• Review old material. Without reviewing old material, taking the Final Exam will be much harder, and you will not be able to retain the basic concepts.
• Ask Questions. Coursera's Forum is a brilliant place for students to ask questions and discuss the videos before taking exams. If you have questions, be sure to ask them- teachers also look over the posts and answer appropriately.

Be sure to learn, enjoy, and get a lot out of your experience. I've spent countless hours on Coursera, and believe I have learned a great amount of material from the website.

Hope this helps! Feel free to comment on this answer, A2A or personal message me if there are any further questions, comments, or concerns.

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Jane Chin (陳盈錦)

Of the many Coursera classes I've signed up then un-enrolled for various reasons, I've completed 4 Coursera Courses.

1. A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior (Irrationality (personality trait))
2. Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence
3. Child Nutrition and Cooking
4. Social Psychology

I'll even share my "grades"!
I'm not ashamed of my 54.2% in Child Nutrition and Cooking!

In my version of reality, I completed only 3 -- not 4 -- courses because I had un-enrolled from the Child Nutrition and Cooking class half-way through. But because I had attempted a few quizzes, I ended up getting a grade despite dropping the course. I dropped the course because I knew I wasn't going to do the final project, which was to cook a meal and take a picture of it.

Let this be a warning to those for whom grades matter: if you aren't sure you can finish the course, check to see if you'd get a number grade based on quizzes you've taken and NOT TAKEN (effectively getting a zero grade averaged into your final grade).

As for what it feels like, I'll aim to distill a composite experience across the different classes I had checked in, checked out, and completed. Taking a Coursera course feels like:

Massive Information Overload.
At times, I felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of "stuff" that I need to navigate through on a weekly basis for each course. Quickly I learned that if there was a subject I really wanted to focus on, I could only take that course and must unenroll / drop others that I rank lower on my priority scale. Otherwise, I'd end up not having enough resources (time and energy are major commitments at this point in my life) to give the desired class my full attention.

The massive information overload also depends on:

• Whether the instructor releases lectures on week at a time, or all at once.
• How much reading the instructor assigned (there were quite a lot of reading for the Irrational Behavior course on top of the weekly lectures and specific assignments).
• When you enroll in the course; if you came in halfway through the course you'll have a lot to catch up if you want to get a grade versus "auditing" the material.
• Whether you decide to get involved in the discussion forums. Sometimes you have no choice because the instructor decides to base a % of your grade on "forum participation" or "forum point score" that ranks you on a leaderboard, which I think is a bad idea. Even though I started tracking my "forum strategy" for one of the classes and ultimately got to #1 rank in the leaderboard, I'd not recommend that grades be based on forum participation because the instructors/teaching assistants can't feasibly monitor for quality. I've seen forums devolve quickly into "posting for points" involving no quality discussion because students want to game this portion of their grade.

Massive Self-Discipline and Guidance REQUIRED.
User and I had various conversations about the idea and ideal of MOOC and my experience has been that MOOCs are leveraged best by students who can exert massive self-discipline and massive self-motivation with time lines involving quizzes and projects / assignments.

Part of this means you learn how to use a time-zone conversion tool and not miss the deadline for a quiz or assignment or exam because you "made a mistake" about the actual deadline.

Part of this means you learn how to pace yourself such that you complete all the necessarily tasks toward your grade and not expect to be given special consideration for forgetting to turn in an assignment. Since the platform is automated, once the deadline passes, you can't turn in the assignment or take the quiz: you can't even access the link to do these.

Once I figured out the time commitment for a course I wanted to complete, I became disciplined about completing the tasks required (listen to lectures, read the papers, do the assignments, take the quizzes, etc.) I often schedule tasks into a calendar because I know I'll forget about it.

MASSIVE INDIGNATION around Peer Reviews Expected.
This is one of the unique features about MOOCs that I liked when it worked for me, and that I hated when it didn't work for me. Since you may have 100,000+ other "classmates", and since the instructors and their teaching assistants (some of these assistants are also trying to get their PhDs while volunteering aka working for free on facilitating the MOOC) can't and won't possibly grade 100,000+ assignments, you enter the "peer review system".

For any MOOC that has peer review as part of a graded assignment, you can expect with high level of certainty an outburst of anger and cries of injustice or unfairness in the way the assignments have been graded. Expect some people to drop the course after the release of the first peer review assignment for the course! Or demand that the professor or T.A. check their special case because it was so unfair.

Peer review at the MOOC scale remains highly problematic on many levels:

• Grading may be subjective even when the instructor tries to render an objective grading "rubric".
• Some students don't interpret the grading rubric the same: students may be overly stringent in their interpretation of what the assignment must present as opposed to "suggested to present", thereby affecting their grading approach.
• Some students don't understand or misunderstand the grading instructions or assignment instructions (one of the beauty of MOOC is also its bane: you are in class with students from all over the world, many of whom don't speak English as a first language).
• Some students are just plain mean or rude. This hasn't happened to me, but I've read on forums during each expected post-peer-review-apocalypse of mean comments that have been written in some students' assignments that has nothing to do with the quality of their work.
• The grades may not be a fair average to eliminate outliers biased as described in my previous points. For example, if my assignment grade is an average of 3 peer reviewer's scores, and the grading rubric is very coarse (a grade of 0, 1, 2, or 3), then it is likely that even 1 peer reviewer's misunderstanding will cost me a high margin in my final course grade.

In conclusion, I'd take a Coursera course again in the future, but I'd pick very carefully which course I'd want to commit toward a letter grade. I haven't bothered with the signature track because I don't "need" this level of evidence for my participation.

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