Learner Reviews & Feedback for Project Management: The Basics for Success by University of California, Irvine

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The course had many information provided and thanks for that. But there are some things I disliked and I guess by fixing them the course would become much much better.

1. The information refers to the PMBOK very often. That is good, as the PMBOK worth (must?) reading for any PM, but it is a bit difficult to understand anything while a teacher just retranslates something, from any book — especially not written by the one — with poor examples. The much better way for lecturer is to explain it by oneself, not by just staying there and repeating what I can read from my display.

2. I dislike fixating to any software. Maybe Microsoft Project is a good example, but I am sure not the only one at first, and as I am a Mac person who has personal Macbook and Mac Pro at work I am not going to use Windows only for one application. There are plenty of them these days, the same or just similar. The key is not a software itself but the methodology using in the one. The methodology is worth understanding, for sure.

3. Grammar mistakes and misprints. It looks a little strange that no one reviewed the materials: neither on Coursera (I am sure it is not so easy to review every course) nor the creators. I am highly puzzled about how it could be possible: if it is a free course for someone there are also many of those who are paying for the courses, and the courses also represent the University. How the University cannot find someone to check the mistakes before publications? (To be precise there are tiny mistakes related to headers and graphics which make the materials looks untidy).

4. Materials production is very poor in details, even for the key ones: typography, colours, thickness of the fonts and lines. There are no contrasts, no highlighting — that looks as a draft, not as a final course worth spending the time, effort and money. If there are no people available to help with producing the materials of a good quality you can ask people from trueowl inc. (the website is trueowl.com and the working email is trueowl@trueowl.com) to help with it. They — we, as I am member of the team — are highly concerned about educational materials and motivated to enhance the quality of the materials, even for free of charge.

Anyway I am glad I finished this course, as it gave me understanding which way should I continue with diving deeper into the theme.

Thank you!

the course is relatively short for providing sufficient technology and knowledge to master a new project. It does give an overall concept of project management procedures and skills. Anyway, it is not as valuable as I expected from the beginning. The professor himself is of deep knowledge and proficient experience. I have experienced several projects and find this course not that well match my expectation.

An okay course as a starting point but isn't very good at making the concepts stick. However, if you're interested in going into Project Management, you can jump off of the concepts that are present here so you can do more research on your own. Course content is distributed like a regular college class so if you're into that, this may be your best bet.

Needs to be a bit more complex and detailed in order to help people get a good understanding of the complexities and issues involved in project management. Please use real world PM uses, not going to work..Show examples of project management that went horribly wrong..lots of those examples as well.

The professor just reads the slides and provides definitions from the PMI. The order of the items is sometimes confusing as it goes back and forth between different topics and definitions. I would add an agenda or clear guide of the topics beforehand, not just as you progress during the weeks.

Despite of the course being insightful, it is not prepared well. The material is not equally divided per week. Also, lecture slides do not cover everything the lecturer mentions. This makes it a bit difficult to study for the quizzes and to be able to answer quiz questions.

All in all it's not abad overview of project management. I happen to have already been certified by PMI as PMP so some of the sections were very light. In particular Schedule & Estimating, which are so critical to project success, could've been looked at more in depth.