Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Psychology by University of Toronto

It was hard to sit through these endless monologues of a wanna be "MOOC cool" Professor. The content of most lectures is generic stuff one can find on the Internet. I did not learn anything new. Since I'd paid for the certificate, I thought I'd finish it. I urge Prof. Joordens (and fellow Canadian citizen) to take some Critical Theory courses and review some of his damaging statements about:

-Muslim women,

-"black" kids of Harlem,

-Schizophrenic homeless people "choosing to live in the streets and being unemployable because" [....Who would hire them?] (fyi: I live in Vancouver, BC)

-or the very poor presentation of the "theory of attraction". An age old unfunded theory presented as the sole work on the topic.

If Psychology is a science, then this course is not about Psychology. It is merely a wikipedia level of content. I am disappointed, but more than that, worried that an influential Professor of Psychology is lacking awareness of his own biases and is spreading this around. Is there anyone ever checking the content of these courses or do we just give these Professors license to say what they want.

Should we even care? I think we must.

A final note, the performative awesomeness of Canada and Canadians is plain repulsive. If this course is meant to reach out to everyone on the globe, can we please refrain from these nationalist comments on MOOC materials. It's is tasteless.

Professor Steve Joordens is beyond awesome!! He made the Introduction to Psychology MOOC both interesting and fun. I would highly recommend this course to everyone. I give it a five-star rating!

The teacher was amazing! I was so entertained with the material we were taught throughout the few months!

Definitely recommend this course so anyone with curiosity to why we do what we do!

Thoroughly enjoyed the course. Always wanted to understand a bit of psychology and this was a wonderful opportunity. Thankyou Coursera and Mr Steve Joordens for this enjoyable learning experience.

Would take it again! :) This was one of the most interesting courses that I ever took in my entire lifetime and one of the rare few where I truly enjoyed sitting through each lecture, wanting to study more and learn more. Dr. Joordens has a very engaging style and breaks down the concepts so beautifully! I have no background in psychology but after taking this course, I've started to take more courses in psychology although my professional experience is in a completely different field. I'd highly recommend this course to anyone who's interested in the workings of the mind and human behavior. I even re-visit some of the lessons sometimes! Great course and totally worth the time and effort!

I loved every minute of this course! Professor Joordens was very engaging and it was set at just the right pace. I'm looking forward to my next course already! The discussion forums are very helpful.

Dr. Steve creates a fun learning environment and is very relatable in his delivery. His approach to an online modality is very natural and engaging. I highly enjoyed the material and the approach.

I enjoyed Steve's teaching style and his level of knowledge. I gave it 3 stars because it did not have objectives for each lesson and therefore I didn't know what the expectation of my understanding should be.

I can't believe I'm finishing this course! I have to admit it was an amazing journey. This is a comprehensive introduction to psychology that covers lots of topics generally but gives you the tools and motivation for further analysis.

When I started I thought psychology was just about why we do things, and I couldn't have been more wrong. This course has opened my eyes, now I understand lots of day to day situations and I'm eager to keep learning.

You'll explore lots of interesting experiments that exemplify different situations and helps you understand how experimentation works in the field these days and throughout history.

Don't expect to be able to analize people and completely analize yourself. This course lets you grasp the concepts and enables you to think through in these situations. Developing, in this way, you critical thinking skills. Now it's up to you to decide wether to keep up with these remarkable lectures.

Thanks Professor Joordens for this amazing time.

Best regards,

Sebastián, from Argentina

good course. suitable for starters. I learnt some basics and something interesting. I now can analyse some social events from the psychology point of view. I understand humanity a little bit better.

The course was great and enhanced my knowledge on various topics. Especially the bystander effect , I was able to relate that in my country India, there have been many cases where nobody helped the victim and just stood around him/her down the road.

Moreover, now I know how my brain works. How conditioning takes place , how sleep affects our lives.

Last but not the least, I would suggest this course to anyone who is curious.

If you are curious this 12 week course is for you , it is not like any other psychology 101 course, it contains a lot of information which would be a great digest if ingested.

As a retired senior I have always wanted to take a Psychology course. I am glad this was the course I chose. The professor was great at explaining some very complicated concepts!

It is slightly unscientific in its political correctness, not tackling head on the psychology of groups and the debunking of feel good concepts like multiple inteligences. However, the lecturer is very good summarizing even though he chastises himself as too talkative. He's not. Moreover he knows his subject very well. I highly recommend this course.

I loved this course, mainly due to our wonderful Professor. He focused on very pertinent subjects in Psychology (I felt like we covered the highlights of a whole year worth of subjects in 10 weeks) AND he did it in a very engaging and fun way. In a nutshell, he is AWESOME!

What I did not like, which is also why I gave it 4 stars instead of 5, is mainly due to organisational matters:

1) the course schedule does not follow the weeks as listed in Coursera which creates TOTAL confusion, and it can be very easily solved. At the very least, the mid-term and final exams should be placed after the correct weekly schedule. Right now it is shifted by a week (earlier)

2) The instructions about the peer assignments were not fully clear. I think also there, this is a quick fix and quick win. Simply adjusting the wording to better explain the process would help reduce questions on the forum.

3) There was almost no staff involvement in the forum. The responses were very far in between, which also made the forum discussions not as lively or exciting. I would have loved having the professor himself on the forum, or at least one of his assistants in the forum, sparking discussions, responding to threads etc. This was almost on existent.

So in short, I would highly recommend the course due to its content! But I also feel that there are organisational improvements, which if made, would make this course a true 5 star course!

THE professor is excellent: charismatic, knows how to explain and put in context concepts, very professional, very articulate, high emotional individual, makes you love PSYCHOLOGY - he is the star. On the other hand the infrastructure lacks many things: a video on HOW TO SUBMIT, EVALUATE the assignement - many questions coming back on FORUMS - and all these would be solved by doing an explicit video about HOW TO - all this should be integrated in week 1 ORIENTATION TO THE COURSE. Second posting a DIPLOMA/CERTIFICATE photo as example - would answer many questions on forums, pls also post this in THE WEEK 1 - ORIENTATION. Third, problems in QUIZ, the first and last quiz are asking questions about info that are NOT COVERED in the weeks the professor is explaining (ex. quiz 1 SHOULD cover the information covered between week 2-week 4, but it has questions about week 5 videos - this I found NOT acceptable). I saw and read many complaints on FORUMS about this - from my side I already repported to accesibility@courserahelp.zendesk.com. Last but not least, the support from COURSERA was always quick and very professionnal, and I hope that all my ideas after readng and facing some problems will be solved very very soon. Thank you for this amazing course, thank you professor and I hope I will be a real student in Toronto soon when I will come back in Canada. THANK YOU and pls send my gratification to professor S. JOORDENS he deserves it.

The course is well structured, informative and updated. I enjoy all sections of the course as well as the humor of Prof (especially all lessons in the second haft of the course are brilliant). The extra topics of Week 11 & 12 are very useful.

I found myself better learning from self reading, so the further video & reading articles are helpful to me. I usually, take further step to explore the related videos or articles. Unfortunately, some of the videos are not available (obviously, not anyone's fault) and some links was wrongly linked to other sites. Sometimes the links in ppt are wrong, sometimes the links in the flatform go wrongly.

I understand that 30 minutes are not enough to cover each topics, so I will prefer to have other courses which provide a deeper investigation in each topics (or some keys topics) . It will be greater if these courses were linked to each others or recommended to learned who completed one of them.

Last but not least, thank you very much for your informative course, especially to Prof. Steve for such a great job. Please keep up with your work.

Best regard,

Sunny

太棒了！作为英语不是母语的高龄学生（42岁），边工作边艰难地学习着，虽然很累，但是收获了很多。首先我从一个心理学的门外汉变成了入门者，而且老师精彩的授课与丰富的课程内容使我对心理学产生了更加浓厚的兴趣，未来会继续在这一学科学习与深造。其次，通过将10个月的学习，是的，因为英语不是母语，我每次课前都要写下载字幕文件进行预习，听完课后还要复习，才能消化课程内容，所以我学了将近10个月！不但成了心理学入门者，我的英语水平（起码是相关的专业英语）有了巨大提高。所以，我非常感谢这门课，非常感谢授课老师。希望有机会还可以听到您的其他课。

I found this course very interesting and interactive. I especially enjoyed the week of extra videos where we went into detailed psychological concepts like dreaming. Thank you for an amazing 12 weeks!

I loved the course it was so informative and fun at the same time. I definitely learned a lot and it helped me in my journey of career shifting.

Enjoyed all classes and learned a lot of things about our mysterious mind.

Nice lector, good information (there are a few mistakes), ugly designed. Guys, it's XXI outdoors, why you choose this poor presentation and micro screen for lector instead of any average MOOC' design on Coursera?

The course is very basic and doesn't deal much with clinical psychology.

This course is really boring as compared to other psychology courses. Most instructors make the course and content engaging but this on is a really big disappointment.

Having taken many courses online I found this one extremely high on coverage, quality of content and dedication of the faculty. The ""side-dish" and additional content showed Just how much of a natural teacher professor Joordens is. Having working in training delivery I have seen the effect on delivery of the dedicated and instinctive nature of the trainer. The fact that Professor Joordens wears his expertise lightly, unlike most people who I have seen deliver talks and sometime when the said "expertise" merely involves a week of research to write an article for a newspaper, is really potent quality. My greatest respects are for people like you who further my strongly held value that all knowledge is a shared asset for us and not a resource to be restricted, exploited or traded. For someone who does not engage in social media I hope this message conveys my deepest regards for people involved in bringing to fruition this excellent course. Thank you.

It is the best course I have ever done in my life including my graduation subjects, post graduation subjects. it's simply awesome the way it has been taught, It has always been interesting never too long and boring at any point of time. he additional video, the informal conversation, the special connect Steve Sir made with us.(me), just amazing!! It has not taught psychology in a way- I would ever thing of teaching anyone anything. One slight thing that I found- would be useful is brief summary of the whole lecture. key points. (though it is something- I would like to do at my own, afterall there has to be some effort and contribution from student. My final words is a great Thank you and a hug to steve Sir, and thanks to Coursera. Superb!