Very helpful :)

Course material was was good, and interesting throughout. The peer review system however was almost useless the majority of the time. There is nothing to stop people not reviewing or giving no feedback of any kind which very much undermines the product. As consequence there's no way for students to know if they are improving at all. A large number of students are also not complying with the task requirements and are submitted garbage (for what reason i have no idea), but still appear to be progressing. Without removing both these categories of people the course will continue to suffer. It's a real shame as the material is good but the marking system is incredibly poor. This is particularly the case in Capstone where feedback is so essential but i received absolutely nothing during this phase. I honestly have no idea, despite having completed the entire course, if what I'm writing is any good at all, or if I have improved in any way which is very disheartening.

The course was really good, but the peer review system leaves a lot to be desired. I enjoyed the opportunity to practice my writing skills, but at least 2/3 of the peer reviews were complete bunk: one word answers like "Yes", or "ok", or just gibberish "dddddd". I understand that for the price you don't necessarily get personalized instruction from professional writers, but it should be trivial for Coursera to implement in their SW platform some screening of students (or bots?) generating garbage instead of constructive contributions. I really appreciate the efforts and interesting content from the professors and writers leading the class; it's a shame the Coursera system doesn't enable a way for it to be used more productively. Expect that you will hear from interesting teachers; don't expect that you will get a lot of useful feedback on your own writing.

I would have given this course 5 stars except for the grading. The only reviewers of your work are fellow students. Some of them do a good job telling you what they liked about the writing and some do not just answering "yes or no" to questions asked. It would be nice if a TA or other students actually in the writing courses at Wesleyan read your work. I have learned a lot and I have liked the assignments but that is where the value has stopped. I know there are too many students for the faculty to grade or even read our work but it would be much more valuable if we really knew how we are doing. The discussion board is sporadically attended and really of no value. Feedback is important in writing and this is the part of these courses that is missing.

The lectures in this class are well done and informative, and they provide a lot of good material. However, the assignment portion needs a lot of work. The instructions weren't clear for anyone taking the class which resulted in incredibly difficult grading. It was hard to even understand the basic ideas of what was required for an assignment.

I think the teacher very much needs to go back and change the wording of the assignments, add more information in the instructions, and also post an example to show what is expected since a lot of the assignments are very strange, like a describing a character without mentioning the character in any way.

This would be challenging one for you, since it is mainly on development of characters, dialogues for your fiction. The tutor is good and has deep sense on characterization, though I did feel some difficulty in getting the concrete idea or point encompassed in the lecture plan. Coming to assignments, as a learner, we have to give our strong reviews for our peers, but here most people wanted to get just grades for extra-certificate, it would be completely fine, if all participate seriously as well as attentive. I am going to apply what I extract from it, and yeah, anyway, it helped me. Thanks :0) coursera.

A very interesting course, provided great insights into the in-depth process of creating character. The assignments were challenging and the peer feedback was very beneficial. I just wish the course focused more on the technicalities involved in character creation. Many of the points raised in each module felt repetitive. More energy and engagement from the main instructor would also have been helpful. Overall a perfectly satisfactory course that really got me writing. Thank you to the instructor and all the guest writers for their time and effort.

I wish the professor explanation were a little clearer, I always had to watch videos two or three times to take notes and understand what she was saying. Also, I know there's not a formula to create a good character, but I feel I missed a lot of it because I couldn't understand her, she talks a lot and uses little explanation and too much passage reading. I would have like the uses of character charts or templates, and more book terms definitions. Overall, there were a few videos that were very eyed opening, specially the ones with other writers.

The most helpful part of this course was the books that Amy Bloom recommended and sited during the lectures. While her descriptions of how to create compelling characters was interesting, I didn't come away from the course with specific exercises or tools I could use. Also, I put a lot of work into the assignments and was disappointed with the scant feedback I received from my peers. Some reviewers simply entered single letters in their question boxes so that they could score my work and move on. Is there some way to police that?

The course information was great and the assignments were very helpful. What lost points for the course was not the content provided by Wesleyan, which was good, but the poor effort on the part of many of the fellow students to really work on constructive critiques. For each assignment I had at least one of the three peer reviews that was useless to me to improve my writing, sometimes more. There should be a way to rate critiques so that students can't move on if they don't do the work of critiquing well.

As much as I enjoyed completing this course, as I've enjoyed every course in this program, this one feels less organised than the others simply in that the learning material doesn't clearly connect with the writing material and it was difficult to predict what the review criteria might be. I found myself guessing at the meaning of each week's modules before completing my assignments and more often than not I discovered little correlation between the videos and assignments.

I'm a bit torn when it comes to the review. The teacher and the material is all top notch, but the review system is seriously flawed. There are far too many non-serious students who leave useless reviews, i.e. just answering each review question with a dot or "yes", and there is no good way to report these reviewers, or to reject flawed or non-existent reviews. It's a real shame because you also get really great and helpful reviews from those who take this seriously.

I like the approach but I was disappointed that, once again, only peer reviews were given. Getting feedback on time is complicated (not many students registered at the same time ?) and some reviews are clearly from people "just there for the credit" who don't take the time to read or give coherent feedback. I received the marvelous "qrt" as feedback on my last assignment.

Mixing peer reviews with the professor's (or his / her assistants) would be more appropriate.

The instructors were great. I learned a lot from them. Sadly, the reviews by other students were, in many cases, substandard. Some would give one-word answers while others just entered a period so the system would record a response. Since I am more interested in learning than in the certificate, I see no reason to pay for the course. I can get the same value by auditing the course. It would be most helpful if the responses were monitored.

Compared to other courses in the creative writing specialization, I felt that this one needs some improvement. The video lectures just didn't have enough meat to them. For example, in other courses in the specialization, there will be links to optional readings or videos, leading to a deeper understanding of the concepts. Some readings, for example, would be welcome to give example of great (or even not so great) characterization.

The course assignments were more challenging but, trying to inject emotion into characters can be challenging. But, the instructions for each task were a little difficult to understand and follow, which is where the Discussion Forum helped.

But, I did develop an appreciation and respect for the ability of authors and fellow students who can accomplish such a feat. I enjoyed reading the assignment stories and reviewing them.

I did come away with some good books/stories for reading, but would have like them to be included in the course the way it is in the Setting and Description module. I found the videos did not always lead up to the assignment, and I think the assignments could have been more clearly laid out. I still came away learning, but it did not feel very structured. To be fair, character is a sort of amorphous subject to begin with.

The course discusses a lot of useful techniques and ideas involved in building deep characters and communicating them with the reader. However, I did find many parts of the course to be repetitive and too abstract to be of any practical use. The shop talks especially seem to be loosely focused on the week's material and the interviewees rarely have helpful responses to Ms Amy Bloom's questions.

Like a lot of other reviewers have said the utility of this class is limited by the wide range of skills of students in it. That means both the work you review and the reviews of your work will vary in quality quite a bit. The lectures themselves are a bit meandering but I think it's mostly very hard to something both broad and substantive about art.

If the week 4 was not there, i would have a 2 or even a 1 for this class.

Until week 4, there was very little connection between what we were watching and what we were asked to write assignments. And the assignments were also confusing and overly restrictive. There didnt seem to be any sense in why we were asked to write those.

It was good , but in comparison to the other courses it had problems.

There was way too less of clear strucutre to follow and it was too much of just talking, with different authors. I would have liked to have a more organized and better structured theoretical input.

Also some of the assignments I did not find usefull.

The peer reviewed assignments don't really strike me as peer reviewed if you are just begging in forums for someone to hit a button. The feedback so far has only a few times been valuable. I don't get the point of the system if reviews can be shopped in forum It negates some of the value of it all.

The lectures were informative, but the end-of-week assignments were VERY poorly explained, generally had little to do with the week's lectures, and to add insult to injury had grading criteria that did not correspond with the points that were laid out in the instructions.

The first assignment was a lot of fun but the other three were a little confusing, as evidenced by the ever-recurring questions on the forum. The videos were usually really interesting though. Amy has a very pleasant voice but seems to rely on her notes a little too much.

Not by far as good as the first module (Craft of Plot). This course seemed less planned and structured. The videos were mostly interviews that sort of touched upon the subjects but hardly ever got into detail. The assignments were often vague and harder to understand.