This course had great content and was really interesting.

Nice course for beginners!!

awesome

I appreciated the animation and breadth of materials, and everything was organized well enough to be easily remembered.

I did have a number of issues with a few areas, like another commentator mentioned there’s a strangely aggressive attack on all forms of spiritualism due to the fact that we think with our brains (?) that’s never really justified in my opinion (declaring atheism true over agnosticism, which seems more scientific to me).

And there is a point later on where a large segment of a lecture is dedicated to Judith Rich Harris’s extreme take on parenting methods, which is that they have 0 psychological impact on adults later in life (even if abusive) and that the only real factors in upbringing are genes and outer social environments. This has been highly contested since it was published in 1998, but we aren’t provided any in-depth legitimate alternate perspectives. It was confusing to see it’s inclusion as it seems to stick out as contradicting large portions of other lectures and raises a number of serious ethical questions that are glossed over.

In order to get the most out of the class, you will likely want to take notes and do the reading. Otherwise, the quizzes are pretty easy to pass with just watching the video lectures, but you won't leave the class with much value.

I wish the lectures had been longer and more substantive. And what other way of interactivity can you get, besides the discussions. I didn't even go back into the lecture after the first time I poked around. It's nothing like in-person discussion groups so it's a little hard to invest.

The course covers most of the topics I expected but the video was very bad. The sound recording is also of very poor quality. The course material is quite extensive. The reading time of 10 minutes allotted is a joke. Some topics take hours to finish. Because of these negatives, I had to drag myself to finish the course, which otherwise is very interesting and informative.

A very engaging course and I would recommend it to someone who wants a very basic understanding of the various sub disciplines of psychology. I felt it was just a bit too easy.

Content was interesting and course offers a good overall introduction into psychology. Course was well structured. Some concepts seemed out dated and presentation of materials also seemed bias. Presentation and video animation were absolutely horrible and hard to get through. Speaker's voice was very monotonous, coupled with video styling, was extremely boring. It's a shame because the content is very good and you can see the speaker is very passionate but it just doesn't come through in how it's presented.

I have completed the course yet I didn't receive my certificate for the same. I had applied for the financial aid which was approved still the link for the sharable certificate is not displayed. Please help.

This intro made no mention of Freud or Jung, both of whom I'd like to study more about. They were pioneers. How could you forget this pertinent info?

More like intro to psychologists. Teach me about the brain, not about theories that don't even hold true in reality.

Irrelevant stuff mixed.

I am looking for something which has less stories, is to the point with quality stuff.

Nice but i haven’t found my certificate yet...

GOOD COURSE BUT TOO COSTLY

want to unenroll

This is the best and one of the most useful courses I have ever attended. I have learnt so much and this course gives a fantastic overview of the subject of psychology. I took this course because I have always been interested in the way people think and curious about the motivations for their behaviours. But more importantly, i wanted to understand my kids more, and help them in their pursuits in life, if I could. Some of the biggest challenges are in the areas of understanding their motivations and capabilities, and one current challenge is in memory retention for their studies. This course gave me a good overview on that, from encoding and methods of encoding information and how failures of memory can occur. But the sum of all the other parts, in understanding their personalities and perceptions are also important, because their ability to learn and retain information and translate them to knowledge also depends on how they think and where and why they are having challenges. I am reviewing the materials again and again because each time I learn something more than my initial reading.

Prof Bloom has managed to condense the breadth and scope of a very complex and wide subject into a highly informational course. I am very grateful for these materials, to have an expert summarize the critical areas of learning to be further explored, if desired. The world is made better by generous contributions as these, for those who wish to understand oneself and others a little more, there is no parallel as starting point.

I also found the animations cute as helpful mnemonics, well done to the animator! And to the Prof who understood that some of us especially an auditory and visual learner like myself need these to help make the points more distinctive and interesting.

Lastly the last chapter on The Good Life, Subjective Well-Being, so needed to tie everything together, for we are a species who can not only intelligently process the causes and effects of our condition, but to also by our actions and design enrich ourselves and others if we so wish.

Thank you Prof Bloom and Coursera, and Ms Julia Veldman the visual storyteller.

I started this course merely to see if Psychology is a field that interests me. Due to some circumstances, I never had the opportunity to study any part of psychology in high school so I wanted to see where my interest stands to pursue higher education in psychology or even neuroscience. I recommend this course to all the people who are in the same position that I was or who are interested in building a good foundation to their knowledge on psychology. I found this course to be so interesting that I completed it in 6 days rather than the average time of completion being 6 weeks. Maybe a smarter idea would've been to have gone through this course gradually as it's meant to be completed in 6 weeks but the fact is that I became so interested that participation in this course seemed not only educational but fun too. Until 6 days ago I was unsure of what I want to major in college but now I think I can say I know the field I want to study for the upcoming 4 years as I had so much fun studying it. This course was very helpful and efficiently educational. The methods that were used were engaging and always left you wanting to research even more on the topics discussed. While taking this course I found out that many questions in psychology are unanswered. There are a lot of theories left to be proven. The good thing is that upon completing the course I feel motivated to do my own research and find possible answers to those questions. Whether I do find accurate answers is not nearly as important as the point that I have an interest to research those theories. To sum it up this course left me feeling inspired to further my knowledge on psychology.

This was my first Coursera course and I have to say, that I am fairly impressed! The course wasn't too difficult to understand and Professor Bloom was always asking deeply thought questions which required his audience to think a lot more about their own behaviors. Throughout this course I myself was able to come to my own hypotheses and theories as to why I and others act a certain way and I'm ready to ask even more questions after doing this course. I'm not an Ivy league student by any means, (I'm in high school.) but I really do think that this course is well fitted for most people. Professor Bloom provides much visual representation throughout his videos. (He's a cartoon.) and speaks at a rate that's not too fast or too slow. (Plus subtitles help.) He further provides articles that are very reliable and relevant to what he's teaching and quizzes that can be redone easily if the student answers a few questions wrong. (or a lot.) I think it would be really interesting if Professor Bloom added courses that a person could do after Intro. to Psychology that were more focused on the specific subcategories of psychology, rather than psychology as a whole itself. For example, a whole class on developmental psychology, personality psychology, criminal psychology, and much more. Overall, I would recommend this course to anyone who just wants to understand people a little bit better. I give this course a 5/5.

Dear Prof Bloom

I had 2 Psych courses as an undergrad, but it had all turned rather hazy in time, which is why I enrolled. Now, I'm relishing the course, and definitely taking all the time I need to LEARN it. I'm constantly behind schedule, but that's because I want to make the best of it, and I have other obligations as well. The second module gave me great insight into language teaching; I already had some knowledge of Skinner, Piaget and Chomsky, but it was superficial. Do I need it to teach English? Maybe not everyone, but I do. I need to see the foundation of the building in order to feel safe manipulating the top floor. I'm in the third part now, and the information I got from your talk as well as the appended articles about attention (esp. inattentional blindness) is going straight into a PP presentation I'm making about why my students shouldn't be checking Instagram while we're doing grammar (with proper referencing, of course). I've talked about it over the years, but with the proper references I'm hoping it'll be more effective.

So thank you already, although I might be writing a second review when I actually finish the course.

Yesim Erdogru

Great for people that are curious towards the various areas of psychology but never studied it in the academy. It is a general overlook of it all. I like to read specialized books of the field and I wish I had taken this course 10 years ago, before those studies. I absolutely adored it and am craving a second part of the course. The Professor provides some pretty awesome extra material for the extra curious people. I have a very nonsense academic history, an associates in Physics, Bachelor in Music and now I was just accepted for a Masters in Psychology, this course laid down a pretty nice bed for what is to come, it pointed out four books (many more, I bought four of them) that added a great amount of knowledge to myself and that I am sure I will use throughout grad school. If you are a curious interested person yourself, do yourself a favor and buy "The Principles Of Psychology" by William James. If you take the course and use the book for consultation you will make the absolute best of it! Have a nice journey!

This was one of the most amazing courses I took. During the pandemic, I really missed the opportunity to learn something new, gain knowledge, and also regretted that I could not begin to study psychology as early as I wanted. And this course turned out to be magnificent in everything - the lectures of Professor Blossom were extremely interesting, entertaining, vivid in their examples from life, jokes, experiments, and much more. Do not forget about the amazing component of the course itself, it's visual part, and tasks that helped to consolidate knowledge. I was glad every minute that I could study on this course, was glad of the opportunity to be involved in the educational process, and found it extremely exciting and informative.

I highly recommend taking this course, as it perfectly expands our knowledge of psychology, not only as a science that deals with mental diseases but also with science that studies how we know the world and how we perceive it.

Instructor Paul Bloom is extremely engaging. The way he presents information is extremely simple, clear, but informative, and his voice is easy and pleasant to listen to, I was pleasantly surprised by the animations in the video and all the text in the slides provided. It was very organised and helped in my learning tremendously. Although this is one of the very few courses I have taken, it is the best one I have taken in terms of educational value and how interesting it is. For someone who was just auditing the course i.e. watching the videos & reading readings, not participating in discussion forums and more challenging assignments, the assignments provided were very suitable as they were pretty short but long enough to help me revise what I had learned, and having the readings at hand was something I appreciated. Would recommend to anyone interested in learning the very basics of psychology, just like me before this course. :)

La psicologia es un tema que me ha apasionado siempre, sin embargo no he estado de acuerdo con muchas cursos cuadriculada que he recibido donde no se pasan de memorizar fechas , nombres y pensamientos de nuestros maestros de la Psicologia.

en este corto pero rico curso, he logrado avanzar y confirmar conceptos que he pensado no han sido salidos de la actualidad

El profesor tiene una manera muy amena de llevarnos por esos conocimientos básicos, donde descubro que no estoy tan lejos de la realidad cuando difiero de algunos pensamientos psicológicos, sin des-meritar otros, toda vez que los tiempos actuales nos llevan a repensar nuestra comprensión a las nuevas generaciones para avanzar hacia una cultura mas positiva.

Gracias profesor es usted un excelente profesional y por lo poco que pude ver me atrevo a decir que también lo es como persona.

Me encantaría asistir por lo menos a una charla presencial!!!!!!

I believe for those who learn better understanding the abstract way, rather than by learning the definitions, this is a wonderful course. Professor Bloom does a great job explaining/ making sense of psychology by using real-life situations. It is also pleasant that terminologies (accurate to the topics ) can be found in the readings to further enhance your understanding. Also, for international students, with English being their second/third language, like my case, it is quite comprehensive. The lectures use images and bullet points as support.

Also, as a side note: this course is free and I attended pricey psychology classes previously (in the same length of 6 weeks. I think that the quality of this course is at the equilibrium, or even better than other psychology courses.

Thank you for your efforts, Mr. Bloom, to provide this course!

It was my first time doing online course. I loved everything about the course, when professor bloom was teaching it felt like I was sitting in the class. I would tell my kids that I am the one sitting with back pony tails. The course was an eye opener, for a lot of things. In my family I have 2 people that psychotic disorder - schizophrenia. I learn a lot and it will be so easy to understand more of what is happening with them. They explanation of the subjects was made simply. I also enjoy the subject about happiness. I am happy that I started the course and finish because it has been my dream to learn something about the mind and human behavior. I love it......I love it. THANK YOU PROFESSOR BLOOM YOU ARE DOING A GREAT JOB, KEEP IT UP. in my venda which is my home language. NDO LIVHUWA ....Angie from South African --Pretoria