It's interesting and I have learnt a lot. I would be great if a couple of videos could be more dynamic, sometimes the voice and facial language were really boring.

Content is excellent and the way it is presented as well. The writing assignments contributed to my understanding and development, but the quizzes did not.

excellent teaching and course content and materiel available. Can do a bit less on the lecture in some videos.

Well-structured, in-depth, serious material, great help with building foundations in Instructional Design.

I learnt a lot. Maybe if there can be workbooks or templates that can make it more practical.

Very good introductory content to build a foundation to begin Instructional Design.

The lectures are great, although it could be suggested more practice exercises.

I benefited alot from this course. Very happy to have completed it.

Good course if you are looking for learning theory information.

Nice course with comprehensive details on instructional design

Very challenging but I would highly recommend this course!

Great start to Instructional Designing career!

Good overall, for a Foundations Course!

The reason why I don't give this course a 4 or 5 star review is because it seems the administrators/facilitators of this course haven't looked into and changed the issues that learners are identifying in the discussion forum with Week 4 quiz- particularly questions #3 and #5. Either the wrong answers were mistakenly checked as correct answers in the quiz builder, or the content does not line up correctly with the questions, because there are inconsistencies with the content and those quiz questions. I spent several hours re-attempting this quiz and became very confused with the content and also very frustrated. In the end, I had to search in the discussion forum for the correct answers that someone kindly provided, or else I would've spent multiple additional days re-taking this quiz until I passed by luck.

Very useful overview of the material for people looking to explore this profession. However - and somewhat ironically for a course about how to design engaging and effective learning experiences - the lecture styles are very dry and mostly unvaried, and the unit quizzes are incredibly vague and hard to pass (make sure to retake multiple times!). The course focuses specifically on the learning theories that inform instructional design, but keep in mind that you don't get to practice any designing yourself - in fact, the course only focuses on the procedures for context-gathering and goal-setting that precede the active phases of design and implementation.

After finishing it I feel that as a standalone course it really doesn't cover enough content to be a benefit. It doesn't finish at a natural pause in topics, but rather feels as if it ends while you are still partway through. As it is part of a mastertrack certificate, I guess it really only makes sense to do the course if you are planning to complete the whole certificate.

The instructors weren't interesting to listen to. I expected better curriculum since the class is Instructional Design. The male teacher mumbled a lot so I'm very glad there was a transcript. It was a good course to get a small grasp of what ID is. I definitely will need to take more courses to actually learn more valuable information.

This is an efficient, convenient way to learn the Instructional Design Foundations and Applications. However, there is no interaction with any of the instructors. The course offers very little practice or ability to apply what you learn. If you enjoy watching videos and reading, this course is ideal for you!

This course is packed with information. It can be hard to digest in the format presented. Please note that many of the professors are skilled but have very thick accents and the transcripts are often inadequate to get the point across.

Really enjoyed the sessions with Grace especially. This was an interesting course considering that I am a Design Educator. I will be able to implement what I have learned in my teaching skills

too much theory., while instructional design is all about practice. The course needs more examples and case studies. Also, the multiple choice tests need improvements

In general, I believe the course was very good and helpful to understanding instructional design. I appreciate the short and reasonable assignments and class length. The content was very interesting and encouraged me so much that I had considered more course work with Coursera and even with the University of Illinois Master Track program. Until week four! The final week culminated in fifteen retakes of the quiz and bought me to a significant level of frustration. I will use question two as an example; “Learning goals should…(Please check all that apply): 1) Focus on the big picture of knowledge gain, skill development and ability/attitude change, 2) Address a performance/learning problem directly, 3) Describe the problem and gap broadly so it can be flexible depending on strategy and the types of learning environment, 4) Describe what the learners will be able to do after instruction.” The detailed notes and my previous training background gave a level of confidence I would be able to answer correctly. I chose the first two responses: “Focus on the big picture of knowledge gain, skill development and ability/attitude change” and “address a performance/learning problem directly.” These two answers were clearly defined in part one video of week four. However, the question was marked wrong! I began to work all the options of answers to get the question correct and for fourteen tries I was still wrong. I did not ever select the last of the four answers since I knew that answer referred to learning objectives and not learning goals. In week four, part three beginning at the twentieth sentence of the video lecture, Professor states, “Learning objectives are the statements describing what learners will be able to do after the instruction.” However, the only way for me to receive a correct answer for this question was to include the fourth answer which is CLEARLY WRONG!! It is not part of the definition of learning goals as outlined in the course. SO FRUSTRATING. Not only would I continue taking the quiz every eight hours for the rest of my life, there is no way to resolve such an issue or opportunity to debate. Part of instructional design is to understand the end user experience and it would do the staff good to see things from the student perspective. My constructive criticism of the course continues with:

1. The above mentioned issue with quizzes having incorrect content, specifically week 4, question 2.

2. The quiz feedback is inaccurate and inadequate.

3. No resolution or ability to resolve questions of content. My effort to highlight this issue in the discussion help form went to never-never land.

4. Only peer feedback and no instruction participation. I had a peer review that accused me of plagiarism with no proof or specific feedback. She simply stated it looked like “it was copy and paste.” Absolutely false and infuriating. The course relies too heavily on peer feedback. There should be other forms of feedback.

5. The course does not complete the ADDIE design model. There could have been one module to summarize the remaining parts of the model after Analysis.

Overall, the course has a significant amount of useful information, BUT it is VERY POORLY DESIGNED, which is an unpleasant surprise since the course is about Instructional Design:

Lectures:

a) Using many different lecturers deprives the course of consistency because students have to adjust to each lecturer's style of talking and pronunciation.

b) Switching back and forth from lecturers to PowerPoints does not help to concentrate on the lectures.

c) Lectures that are longer than 15 minutes are very hard for students to keep their focuson.

Suggestions: make lectures shorter, have one, two at most, lecturers; have a lecturer view start and end the video, and have narrated PowerPoints in between.

Assessments:

a) Quizzes - different numbers of questions in each quiz and time sensitiveness in some quizzes bring chaos in the learning process; students have to guess their instructors' exact thoughts - the Week 4 quiz is especially poorly designed.

Suggestions: have the same number of questions for each quiz throughout the course; time all or do not do it at all; make the answers clear and easily derivable from course resources.

b) Written Assignments - grading through peer reviews is a nightmare, heavily based on a subjective point of view.

Suggestions: remove the grading portion from peer reviews and leave only the feedback comments required.

Demand Hours:

a) Weekly demand hours are unbalanced - one week is heavier than another which is not helpful for students to plan their learning time.

b) Reading rates are ridiculous: 10 minutes are given to read 12 pages of scholarly reading while in reality, it can take about an hour (undergrad - 11 pp/hour, grad - 13pp/hour)

Suggestions: Balance weekly demand hours and put in feasible reading rates.

I work as an Instructional Designer in a University, and if this course is well-designed, I would consider taking the suggested MasterTrack. But since this course was designed so poorly, it became an anti-advertisement for me about the University, which offered it, and Coursera platform as a whole.

The level of frustration I got from taking this course overpowered all of the useful knowledge that I acquired from it. I do not think I am going to take another course neither from the University of Illinois nor on Coursera platform in the near future.

I rate the course TWO out of FIVE and only for the useful theoretical information that has been presented in videos and readings.

Course was very demoralizing, and does not showcase the principles it teaches about Instructional Design. It comes off as a very lazy presentation with minimum effort.

On the positive, I did learn a lot that I had not known before, and there is a lot of general information given about Instructional Design. However, any pluses on the content is ruined from the learning experience as a whole.

The videos are 'talking heads' with the instructor speaking to the camera 90% of the time with a few PowerPoint slides in between. Very little visual stimulation presentation to otherwise to engage the learner. Scripts were not edited to ensure content matched the speaker. Videos often leaned toward the 20-25 min. mark for length, and some modules had 8 videos to review, making it very drudgery to complete.

Many quiz questions were often ambiguous and ill-worded, and paired with a 'select all that apply' approach made them confusing with potential for multiple interpretations that could be applicable. Test feedback was little and unhelpful. References to videos for answers were sometimes wrong. Completing the quizzes turned into a means to an end, rather than verifying learned info and comprehension.

Peer-reviewed assignments are graded by a single person, making the pass/fail grade subjective and dependent upon that person's interpretation of the assignment and course content. This creates a lot of instability and greater potential for fail rates, whereas other Coursera courses have used 3 reviewers to create a stable grading consensus. Reviews required evaluation on grammar and spelling, despite the instructions specifically telling students not to do so.

There's a lot of room for improvement.

The readings were the most useful part of this course. The videos were difficult to follow, and quite frankly, very boring, due to poor delivery. I felt that the essential learning points could have been taught in much more concise and more structured video lectures. It would have been easier for me to work through the content with slides using text only, with no speech. The video transcripts were not accurate.

The quizzes often contained elements that were not covered in either the lectures or the readings. Sometimes the wording of the quizzes was ambiguous, so it was not clear why the correct answer was the correct answer. For the final week 4 quiz, I had to retake the quiz about 8 times due to being unable to work out the correct answer for 2 out of the 8 questions. In the end, I just guessed until I got the right answer. I have no idea why the guess was correct.

While I learnt a lot, this learning came from the readings and not from the video content.