Generally speaking I think the course content is good, but I rated this course average because of three main reasons.

1). I think a little more effort to organize the material would go a long way. For example, the grammar presentations refer to new vocabulary words that were not introduced in the vocabulary list, and the vocabulary exams refer to content in the grammar section. It would be nice if the curriculum were designed so that you could study the vocabulary, take the vocabulary exam, then review the grammar and leverage what you learned in the vocabulary section to re-enforce your learning.

2). I also think that some of the topics deserve additional clarifications, and the presentations themselves are very short. I appreciate the length of the presentations when reviewing the presentations to refresh my memory, but difficult concepts sometimes require more attention than they are given. In some cases, it seems as though an elegant choice of words to describe a difficult concept is more important than taking the time to deconstruct that concept into simple phrases.

3). Lastly, there are errors in the presentations and exams, and little to no involvement from the professor to clarify points and/or correct those issues. I have noticed comments from students who have reported the same issues for the past two years, and those issues are still not corrected. I used to comment on the message boards for clarifications and to report errors, but after getting zero responses from the professor I stopped participating.

Conclusion:

Overall, I think it's a good course - it provides a good structure for learning the Spanish language despite the above shortcomings. Although they appear very simple to address, I see the same shortcomings exhibited by every course in the series.

Many of the assignment directions are unclear or unhelpful at best, and incorrect answers do not result in helpful feedback.

The course is fairly well designed and you can learn a lot, but the evaluation method of being rated by peers is far from perfect and can lead to very faulty evaluations.

1. This course did not provide much focus on speaking skills and pronunciation, but the mandatory peer-graded assignments evaluated the learners on how well other fellow learners understand their vocabularies and pronunciation, which I found quite unfair and very subjective. Evaluation of speaking skills should not have been worth as much as 5 points out of 22, or at least shouldn't have been done through such a poorly designed, heavily subjective question. This is an online, beginner level Spanish class that only lasted the maximum of 3 weeks, the fact that near perfect pronunciation was expected is highly unrealistic. I spent a decade trying to speak understandable English to native English speakers, to expect fellow beginner level, non-native Spanish speakers to understand 100% of my speeches in a course that I only spent 1 week to complete is unreasonable.

2. Peer-graded assignment submission template should be easier to understand to prevent people from accidentally failing to submit their assignment with a valid link to their video/audio records.

3. The program for vocabulary game was a little outdated and all in Spanish, which is harder to understand than the actual vocabularies in the game themselves.

Thank you for the opportunity you gave me to study Spanish online! To succeed in this Basic Spanish course, you'll need a lot of: determination, patience, resourcefulness... and a lot of repetition. The lessons were terse, but this pushed me to go out of the course content. If you are a patient self-directed Spanish language learner who wants to be challenged, then this course is for you. Surely, you'll enjoy doing the required assignments. Also, always be a dedicated peer reviewer so you can make the best out of this course; when reviewing your peers' work, try your best to identify errors, learn new words, etc.

Este curso es excelente! tuve la oportunidad de seguir aprendiendo español. Estoy estudiando en Argentina y necesito tener la certificación B2. Creo que este curso es fundamental para realizarlo.

I would very strongly recommend this course. It is a very well thought and planned module, it is fun and informative with some serious assignments that can be challenging but well worth it.

Um curso muito interessante. Mas é necessário um conhecimento básico de inglês e da própria língua espanhola, para poder acompanhar melhor este curso.

We have an amazing professor from UC Davis here. He explains every topic in a very precise, clear and concise manner.

Thank you so much to my instructor for instructing Ana Pelayo.

Ana Pelayo.

Great course, awesome professor!

This course seemed to me a little bit harder. Not for complete beginners.

Very good Spanish course! I was already able to make use of it during my holidays!

I think i am benefitting by the structure of the course, but do not feel that the 1 minute videos are adequate to teach the concepts. The quizzes help, but i had to reach out to other sources to learn concepts, e.g. of indirect objects and others. more practice quizzes with answers perhaps?

A good course but had some complains while studying, the modules pratice tests aren't helpful at all and some lessons either, meaning it is sometimes hard to understand what to do in there. Although have good aspects about their peer review and certificate.

The grammar portion assumes a knowledge I don't have and makes little effort to help me compensate. Hopefully I will be able to absorb it by rote. Other than that, I found the course to be enjoyable and worthwhile.

quite difficult

I found this course a very nice continuation to the first one. The grammar and vocabulary are of appropriate level and don't overwhelm you with too much information and the course is presented in a very learner-friendly way. I enjoy learning Spanish this way.

I loved this course very much. I learned so many new words and sentence structures and grammar. I do wish I could ask some questions about some grammar topics, but it was overall very helpful and pushed me to get a level further in Spanish.

The course was really useful and we were taught some quite difficult and very important topics. Thank you very much for this opportunity!

I loved the class!! It’s really good and I could improve my Spanish more. Thank you for this course

This course covered a lot of useful material and was more advanced than I had imagined it would be.

I really like this course and want to continue learning Spanish with Dr. Robert Blake and Coursera

great course. very useful for everyone who wants to get the basics in spanish

very good didactics, nice videos from mexico, I really enjoy learning :)