Learner Reviews & Feedback for Creative Problem Solving by University of Minnesota

In my view the content of the course is a bit thin. There are a lot of creativity techniques out there, but this course only picks mainly two (mindmapping and attribute listing) and those are only a few minutes in the videos. The excercises are interesting, but I never understood why they should be done in public and there is no real explanation. The instructions for the exercises should be more precise - sometimes I was surprised by the criteria (e.g. to provide a 200 words description which never was mentioned before but was part of the grading criteria in week 1).

Somehow the course seems to be dead. There seems to be no moderator in the forums. The majority of postings in the forums are "please review my excercise" - which I have never seen on another coursera course before in that extend. I myself had issues with getting my submissions graded. The idea is that you get rated by 4 peers, for most of my submissions I only go one single grading. And my last submission I had to submit 3 times because the only guy who rated my work gave me 0 points (the same guy - twice !) as a revenge because i couldn't give him more on his work. I flagged this grading but never got any feedback.

Finally the work of my peers that I had to review did in many cases not meet the requirements (e.g. no photos / videos posted, even it was cleary required, and sometimes just a general stuff and not documenting their personal attempt to do the creative task. In many cases I had the impression that students only submit something to get the grading but they didn't really read the instructions or did not put even a little energy to get the task done. So reviewing the work was no fun either and didn't give me any more value.

I did a posting in the forum with suggestions to improve the course but there was no feedback at all.

So overall: The course is giving some value, but not as much as I expected. There's not a lot activity in the course (with ratings of the exercises and in the forums) and a moderator seems not to be here. I would wish a bit more creativity from the course provider regarding the content of the course and from the students with there work.

Some interesting projects/exercises and information but unfortunately almost all if not all the information was from a 2014 teaching of the course. So a lot of the videos had references to projects we did not do, and they were not that fresh or current. Most frustratingly, a large part of the grade depends on exercises called DSDs. They tell you to upload lots of photos to document your experience, and your grade is directly correlated to the number of photos. But then the current platform only allows one photo upload. So a lot of the entire course was rendered ineffective and frustrating by a limited platform. For several of the projects , I planned and took many photos to tell the story, but then you were limited to only uploading one photo.

While I found the course content interesting, I really didn't learn anything new. I thought that it was kind of oxymoronic for an instructor to be talking about trying something new, making changes and being creative while all of the videos showed him wearing the same (or similar) suits in the same office with the same bland décor and the same coffee mug. Change it up a little, and tell us about what you have done that i creative.

It was interesting and "out of the box"; I liked it in general. But during the last week of the course, I realized that some content was too repetitive in my opinion.

The assignments do not give you any practical methods for actual problem solving. They're just a succession of activities that pretend to be creative by making you do things "you wouldn't normally do". It's like they forgot the part about "problem solving".

The assignments are to eat foods you've never eaten, talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to, take a photo of yourself smooching someone/something, and to "give" something to someone you "never have given anything before". That is not creative nor helpful at problem solving. It's just a series of activities for people who have too much time on their hand and need something to do to get out of their routine.

Not a course I would recommend for anyone wanting to gain useful skills.

SO INTERESTING AND FUN. Have you ever took a stranger'S secret and propose another stranger to take that secret in exchange of one of his? This course is an opportunity to do crazy stuff like that!

Very good course to open up your creative window

The only good material came at the very end of the course, otherwise the content was poor. The lecturer kept rephrasing over and over the statement, 'If you are creative than so be it!' There was nothing of a kind of discovery to me. All could be done by doing my own research. Typing errors were frequent and grammar errors, and some videos were really amateourish. Elaborate and outlined instructions on how to critique your peers' work, but when comes to evaluation, it requests only for selecting the multiple choice options. The reading required to pass the quizzes were RIDICULOUS in terms of amount and content, one was a- 22 pages of sweat-work of some self-appointed 'science philosopher' that was so unclear in regards what to focus on, literary merits, the content synthesis or specific details. REALLY??? So you 'bite through' the reading and you find out that questions are not what you thought they might be. The coursework is not a place for such a lengthy and not too relevant material, it is for home study, to broaden your interest.

At one point they ask you to develop your creativity in one of the assignments. But they right away KILL that creativity, by outlining in layman terms HOW to do it, saying COPY this advice and you will be fine, because this is what we want. SERIOUSLY! Week execution, week organization, chaos. For the international students that do not have English language fluency the second reading may be challenging.

The course expresses no respect to the learning goal and interests of the student. We come for more than this! So in one word - disappointing.

I really enjoyed doing things in creatively at the public area that made me to step out of comfort zone. Thank you. :-)

Thank you for an amazing challenging course

very good course .

The material is interesting, but the presentation of it begs many more additional takes. My apologies in advance for being blunt, but a lot of my time was really wasted on watching majority of the videos. Honestly, I couldn't wait to just get to either the reading material or challenges. The presenter was not well rehearsed, and poorly reading the teleprompter/screen - not a way to keep the learner's focus. Unfortunately, it was also hard to get excited to keep up with the material or get any creative juices flowing when commanded to have fun in a constant monotone.

This course is very interesting. It helps me to look at things I am familiar with in different perspectives. Furthermore, it encourages me to challenge the habit and norms and work with things in a new way which can make it better.

This course makes you stretch your creativity to new lengths as you try new and unusual ideas, Explains how we all can increase our creativity through practice and the practical ways to do so.

A Challenging and entertaining course, the course includes assignments which improve ones creativity and which lead to finding diverse ways to problem solving and generating new ideas

This course instilled a sense of confidence as well. The tools,techniques and methods used to convey abstract ideas pertaining to creativity were simple and effective.

this was a very interesting course and at the same time challenging. i have learnt a lot of creativity and will keep challenging myself and the people around me

The highlights of the course are the live tasks you are given to complete it. A little more videos regarding creativity and more theory would have made it a complete course.Still it is pretty much enjoyable. Go for it.

this is quite basic and all the tools discussed are already known , moreover there is no example or application on how it can be used practically.

La parte que te tienen que valorar las personas que hacen el curso hace que se tarde mucho en acabar el curso.

Ideas and exercises are good but the rest is just sloppy work.

This course felt stale, like it has not changed in over 10 years. The readings are from 2010. The professor seems bored. There seems to be no moderation of the comments. There was not any real dialog, and the assignments I reviewed were for the most part incoherent. The peer review process is unclear and the instructions for assignments use strange sentence structure. It seems a "one size fits all" approach. There was no way to upload text for the first assignment. I'm not sure I will pursue another Coursera offering.

Not what I expected. Though the lecturer quite patronising and the exercises too juvenile. Did not finish the course, so it may have improved after the first few sessions. Thank you.

Needing other people involved in person during the do something different assignments is not a good choice while social distancing.

I really enjoyed this course, it was very informative and easy to follow. The videos were clear and the graded sections were great. The course as a whole was enjoyable and would recommend to others.