Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Galois Theory by HSE University

It is a rare online course of advanced pure mathematics. Overall it is very good. It is not recommended to take other courses in parallel with this course as it will consume lots of time on external notes and references. I would recommend National Research University to open more similar courses on abstract algebra, like Groups, Rings, Fields and Modules as a bridge program to this course, or an extension of this course to Lie Algebra or Representation Theory.

That's a great course for those who want to broaden their horizons in mathematics. Learning process involves a huge amount of useful information from different areas, such as linear algebra, fields and rings theory, and many more.

But I'd like to share some thoughts with possible readers of this review.

1) A learner should have a really strong mathematical background. I would say that it's a graduate-level course, and I couldn't recognize that from course description. Otherwise,

2) One needs a HUGE amount of time to learn all the material thoroughly. Just to clarify, I'm changing my job now, so I fortunately have a lot of free time. And I spend almost ALL of one for this course! :) That's great, I'm ready to do that, but how many people have that kind of possibility? Amount of given information is enough for a separate specialization in Coursera terms, so maybe it would be good to split this course into several separate ones.. for sure, it fits into a standard HSE university course. But I can say that I do have some background in maths, but a number of years it was unused, so it takes time to recover a lot of things. Just my thoughts, but I see how discussion in forum is fading away, guess it means that a lot of people start giving up.

3) And finally I would suggest to add some small quizzes within lectures as it's done, for example, in 'Learning How To Learn' course. In my opinion, it can help learners to catch more from videos.

So, 3 weeks left to finish this course, so I'm starting a next quiz! Thanks to everyone and happy learning! Or teaching :)

Overall, this course has very solid content. In fact, this is one of the few (probably the only one) advanced mathematics course on Coursera. More specifically, in order to take this course, you need to have good understanding of group, field and ring. In other words, you are assumed to have taken general undergraduate level abstract algebra courses before.

However, there are some aspects of the course that are worth improving. First, probably due to the nature of online course, I personally find learning Galois Theory online very challenging. The lectures themselves make sense. The practice problems and quiz, however, sometimes do not seem to be reinforcing the lectures. The materials on tensor product seem to be unrelated as well. Usually these are covered in a course on commutative algebra. In addition, there was almost none communication within the discussion forums.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this course if you have good background in general abstract algebra. After all, Galois Theory has long been a capstone type of course. If you have some background but not solid, it is definitely still doable.

1) great course material, it's rather hard to find lectures online.

2) Calls a lot of results "trivial" and "easy" or very "simple".

3) The teacher does not seem enthusiastic nor is her English particularly good.

4) Lectures aren't very structured, the lecturer moves from definition to example to lemma to remark without clearly indicating the boundaries.

It's a good topic. However the quality of the lectures are pretty low. In my opinion people could learn the topic more efficiently by reading Stewart's book.

Outstanding course so far - a great refresher for me on Galois theory. It's nice to see more advanced mathematics classes on Coursera.

Difficult class, but well worth the effort!

The course is really well done, with good and clear videos and sets of weekly exercises. A bit concise and require a good knowledge of basic Algebra and some expansion with chapter books/notes during the lectures to fix concepts and see more examples. A set of slides could have been useful but there's a recap available from a student in the course that does a relatively good job for this. For me Week 4 and part of Week 5 (tensor products and related stuff) were really hard to follow without a previous knowledge of the matter, and I expanded it reading some suggested chapter books and internet notes (particularly useful those by Keith Conrad at U.Conn. on tensor product). I will move to five stars if some more time will be dedicated to explain tensor products and apps and make handouts.

Several comments, in general the course is well conducted,it is not easy to follow, but this is natural as it a very abstract subject. The exercise sets (peer-reviewed) where very instructive, but I think that the quizzes where a little too easy in comparison. I missed a little a more intuitive view, a broader view of the subject as well as a review of more advanced applications and developments, such as infinite Galois groups, etc.

First of all, it is great that some more advanced courses such as this one are offered on coursera. Unfortunately, a lot of the potential of online learning was not realised in this one. The lectures were handwritten on a tablet, there was no additional reading material, and as the text was difficult to read, it is often necessary to relisten to the video when you just want to look up some detail. Also, the problem sets were not very well coordinated with the lecture. The forums are almost deserted, there do not seem to be any moderators around.

this a great course.One might wonder considering the length of this course that the content is not much, but once started ,one week's content is more than enough to keep us busy for whole the week. as well as the references perfectly go hand in hand.

The couse is complete, everything you need to learn the introduction to Galois Theory is in it. I would recomend for all math students in all levels, as long as you truly have the time to study.

A difficult course for me, personally, but that makes it all the more worth it! Taking this course has helped me learn more I thought I would. Definitely recommended.

You need to work hard to complete this course. Awesome exercises. I learned a lot from this course.

An intriguing course.

Uncommonly advanced material.

Rare content on Coursera.

Hard Course, but if you spend time on it, you will definitely learn a lot.

Very interesting course for poeple with knowledge in algebra.

Very interesting course where I got a lot

It was a great experience.

A very interesting course

Work hard, learn more.

A wonderful course!

Great course!

perfect

the content is rich, though a little advanced. I strongly recommend this course to others, because I personally learned a lot from it.