Learner Reviews & Feedback for Children's Human Rights - An Interdisciplinary Introduction by University of Geneva

The contents are great. Presenters who just read (which were not all of them!) tend to be very boring.

Excellent online study and eloquent lecturers. Makes online study sweet and comprehensive

The course contents were really good, but the English level of most of the lecturer was unacceptable.

Lack of reading material. Quizzes were too easy to pass. It would make me do more effort if anytime I failed the quiz, there were new questions.

j'avais fait des cours sur les droits des enfants mais ce cours m'a vraiment apporté une plus félicitations et merci de «démocratiser» le savoir

I think the course was focused to much on aspects relating to the history of the Convention of the Rights of the Children and less on the actual subject. The transcripts had some errors, although these would have been very useful as the teachers are not native English speakers. It did not motivate me to pay for the Certificate.

However, the presentations with the actual subject (human children rights) had been interesting and I learned new things during this course. Other courses relating to aspects concerning children (custody, international kidnapping, single parent family, etc) would be very useful and interesting.

As mentioned in the course's title, it is an introductory course on children's human rights. As such, it can be a very useful resource for a beginner. Whilst I am not a complete beginner, I did learn about the issue and familiarised myself more with children's rights. After completing the course, I am interested in learning more and digging more into some of the issues that were discussed - in that, the course has definitely delivered.

However, the course would gain from some improvements:

First, as a non-native English speaker, I understand the difficulty of teaching a course in English - however, almost all lecturers were reading their notes and had a strong accent. This killed the dynamic of each lecture. In addition, the transcripts of all videos, including those of interventions made by native English speakers, were full of mistakes (for example, "treaty body" was transcribed as "tricky body", "NGO" as "Ango", and so on). In my view, it would have been more accurate and dynamic if the lectures had been taught in each speaker's native language, with subtitles in English.

Second, the forum, which could be an incredible platform allowing students from all over the world and lecturers to share their experiences and exchange ideas, is left practically unused. Students asked legitimate and interesting questions, both on the substance and logistics (such a technical problems with weekly quiz), most of which were left unanswered by lecturers. In my view, an effort should be made to ensure that the forum is active and that questions are answered.

Third and last, some of the resources supposedly available to students were not, either because access was restricted to paid subscription only or because links do not work. It would be great if all links are checked and all resources are shared. In addition, suggestions for further reading and/or courses would be useful once the course is completed.

All in all, I have paid for the certificate (prior to starting the course). However, whilst I am happy to have one now, I do not think that the level of the course is worth paying for it without correcting the issues I mentioned above.

Good basic coverage on children's fundamental rights. The course could have benefitted from assignments being more consistently accurate to lessons as there are some gaps. The last module I found the most interesting as it covers challenges to child rights in real time cultural/social dilemmas.

Useful for those who want to learn about child rights for the first time. Will not recommend to professionals.

Overall the course is very informative. However it has a few strong weakness that impact the learning process, which I would like to point out. First of all, due to some heavy accents of the lecturers it is not always understandable what is being said, while the transcripts and subtitles are not proof read, their text contain errors and unrelated words. Secondly some tests contained confusing questions, which were not directly covered by the learning materials. Thirdly, the lack of interactive learning makes the process of learning a bit dull. I am sure there are many interesting video and interactive materials on the covered topics.

I was slightly disappointed by the course: too much information was given and not always in a clear way. In particular, sometimes the sessions were jumping from one discipline to another with not much explanation and this was confusing. Also, the information provided was in huge amounts but not in details. I expected to get more detailed information on children's rights while sometimes the presentations were only very general overviews.

The audio was very bad at points

The transcripts are automated and aren't proof read, therefore don't make sense at times which makes it difficult for those struggling with the accents of the lecturers - which can be very hard to understand. They also talk very very fast at times which is again hard to understand when they're accents are strong and their English imperfect.

Interesting content but could be made more interactive and varied with more optional readings. Some of the questions on the quiz were not well formulated either.

It is more basic than I thought it would be, and the questions on the quiz are extremely specific (like years and names of people) which in my opinion, doesn't help capture the essence of what you are learning.

The content of the course so far is interesting - and to be fair, I've only completed the first week of this course.

Unfortunately, the combination of multiple lecturers within one part of a lesson (often with highly varying accents, reading verbatim from lecture notes) makes the presentation of the course material come off as very stiff, over-directed, and hard to understand. It's hard to adapt to the idiosyncrasies and lecturing style of a new person in a four minute video, at which point you get a whole new lecturer and have to start the process over again.

A maximum of two or three lecturers for the entirety of the course (perhaps with the occasional guest speaker) would be helpful. Also, either allowing the them to deliver the course material in their native languages with English subtitles, or perhaps having them record the course material in English in something similar to a classroom environment where they're accustomed to lecturing, would make things infinitely easier to follow.

This 'too many cooks in the kitchen' issue is what I also suspect happened with the week one quiz. I do not know who generates the quiz questions but they seemed to require a lot of mental gymnastics for a multiple choice quiz. Perhaps on my end there could be a cultural misunderstanding in how a quiz checks your knowledge of the source material? Let me put it this way: in my previous university studies, I have never taken a multiple choice quiz where the question starts as 'In your opinion...'

Sadly, I will probably drop this class - but the course has sparked enough of an interest where I will probably be picking up some books or doing some informal research on my own about this topic.

Although very interesting and very innovative in its presentation I had the feeling this course was an introduction to the Master program at the UNIGE, rather than a stand alone course. At times it was difficult to comprehend the speakers. I would have preferred deepening of one aspect of this topic rather than such a broad approach.