Learner Reviews & Feedback for Religions and Society in China by HSE University

Thank you so much, Prof Maslov and Coursera. Amazing experience...

Very informative ! Makes me want to visit China even more !

it suits me well and helps me a lot!

Interesting and fun course! Thanks.

Very well organized and presented.

Excellent, thank you very much.

Великолепный курс!

Amazing course

I enjoyed the course and learned a great deal about the topic. The course is well structured, and Professor Maslov is likeable and thorough. Unfortunately, he can also be difficult to understand. His slides are detailed and usually very good, but they're not a complete substitute when you can't catch what he said. This wouldn't matter if the course had a reliable transcript of the lectures, but the transcript is terrible. It is dreadfully garbled, and sometimes it says almost the opposite of the point Professor Maslov is making! This is the one thing that needs to be improved significantly. The bottom line is that you can get a lot out of this course, but you'll have to learn to triangulate between the lecturer's spoken words, the slides, and the transcript (which you really, really cannot trust) in order to be sure of what's being said. It's not too bad once you get used it, but I hope they'll get someone to edit the transcript. It would greatly improve the experience.

This a very informative and reasonably objective course that didin't shy away from controversial topics. Combined with reading the corresponding Wikipedia articles I now have a good overview of how religion and society interact in contemporary China. It is a pity the English and its pronunciation of the speaker is somewhat below par. I spent many hours on cleaning up the video transcripts. Also some Chinese names mentioned in passing during the videos and absent from the slides are missing in the transcript.

Overall I really enjoyed taking this course.

Really great, it really helps to get a general idea of the religions in China and the situation nowadays. It would be great that during de different themes or weeks, new or more specific bibliography is given so, now that the course is over one can continue to investigate

the course was good but the accent of the teacher was not clear and whenever there were foreign words the text also did not carry those words. Thanks to Prof. Alexey for a wonderful course.

Firstly, I'd like to say it is an interesting course to take. Especially for me, who did not have any knowledge on the subject, it was a rich source of learning. However, I'd like to point that most of the lessons didn't have a nice flow to follow. I got confused in the themes dealt in the slides very often, since sometimes it was a new topic totally disconected with the last one. Also, some basic questions like "what is", "when was it", "why was it" remained unanswered in lots of slides, so many of them i couldn't understand. In the overall, the course has a lot to improve, but was very enriching for me.

The course was good. The idea of covering the different religions was a very good one. Unfortunately the slides were not made available to students and no other readings or material was given. Requests to make the slides available were not dealt with. The tests could have been better. Finally, the transcripts weren't always good, may-be because of the pronunciation of the professor.

The first week's content is quite inspiring. However, I don't think many of the Taoism concepts are widely accepted and correct... For example, the explanation of Jing as semen is quite superficial while the meaning of Jing should be more profound.