Learner Reviews & Feedback for Agile Meets Design Thinking by University of Virginia

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Overall very good course - the instructor seems to be very professional, with deep subject knowledge and expertise in domain.

At the same time the way the information was delivered is a bit confusing for several reasons:

First. The instructor doesn't make a proper intro into agile frameworks and processes and you cannot really understand in which part of the puzzle the design thinking fits in. If I didn't have basic knowledge on agile development methodologies I wouldn't really understand at what step and how should I apply the design thinking.

Other confusing thing was the presentation itself. The presentation slides are overwhelmed with the information and texts, many times absolutely unnecessary, so that you have to stop the video to read them, but actually it doesn't give you any important additional information and doesn't bring any additional value. And the whole bunch of information you are trying to read on the slide is overlapping with a lot of information provided by the instructor, so all together it becomes very confusing and difficult to structure in your mind.

The last thing - during the presentation the instructor uses the pen to underline/select some information which creates additional confusion and makes the whole presentation process kind of "messy".

Overall I would recommend the course, but you better have some basic understanding of the agile processes before to start it.

My notes, I think, have captured all the essentials from the course. I will need to rearrange them into a handy reference. The exercises helped reinforce the learning and validate the templates. As for the final project, I somehow downloaded the wrong template. After puzzling over the rubric and that template, I searched and found the correct template. Appears that maybe one the papers I peer reviewed might have been on that incorrect template.

The instructor lectures as though he was a long-tenured professor, but he actually comes from years of commercial experience. Very impressive.

The course seems to be mostly design thinking, and little bit of Agile. That's fine. This course could stand alone as design thinking. If there is no other stand-alone design thinking course from this provider, this course could apply very well across many disciplines. It has some things in common with Google's internal Agile processes.

As nice as this course is, I'm still sort of wondering why it's in the UVA curriculum. I guess core and specialties have broadened quite a bit in the last 10 years.

The discussion of emotion and reward was very insightful.

A great course to start. IT bridges between Design Thinking and Agile. I found that very valuable, especially for Product Owners who need to understand what "Pre-Scrum" activities are required/helpful in their role, i.e. it doesn't make sense to define what you want before you know what you need.

Some of the videos have a bit of lengths, if you're already familiar with the topic. But that might be part of the didactics for beginners.

The Quizzes sometimes seem to be a bit 'awkward' - i.e. maybe they aren't very obvious for non-native speakers while they are for native speakers? It's often littel details, or rather the tone of the sentence, that seems to make it the right answer.

The access to templates etc. is great although they are available in the internet anyway if you know where to look.

The skits remind me the TV distance learning for English in the 70ies in Germany. I find the funny but not as usefull as they could be. But I like the idea.

I liked the course, it was good, and really prepared me for the user story portion. Or so I felt it did. I have not gotten my grade back yet. We will see if I actually understood. The only reason it is not 5 stars is the portion of the pier reviewed part, where you might have to grade someone who really did not understand what was being asked of them. Or you could be graded by someone who did not understand. Its just a difficult situation. If there was maybe a screener review for that, it would be a little better, but over all still good.

Great lectures, highly engaging. However, this course, and the rest of the courses in the Specializations, seem focused more on designing and executing market/product research methodologies. Agile, as a framework and as a practice, is discussed in length in two or three lectures only. If learners need in depth Agile discussions, you may want to check other courses for that. If you are into product innovation driven by designing studies on target markets, then enroll in this course.

If you're in the path of certifying as a Product Manager, this course must is a must (besides actually being mandatory, lol). Most of the times forgotten, it's fundamental to set and maintain the north on our potential users/clients/customers, and move from there with empathy. The relationship beteween personas, problems, alternatives and value proposition and how they need to be present every step of the way (and challenged) is something to set as a mindset.

Content was excellent. Grading process was a disappointment. When I submit an assignment, I must grade three others before my assignment is available to be graded. Three others must then grade my assignment before I receive an average grade. This sounds great in theory, but my assignment is stuck in limbo land. Perhaps it is because I am motivated - ahead of proposed schedule.I cannot afford to drag this course out; grading delays are extremely frustrating.

Good course, that covers the basic agile concepts for creating personas and user stories well. The instructor, speaks clearly although I personally found his pacing and word choice different enough that I had to pay attention else I'd have to rewind and re-listen some sections to glean what was most important. I found the templates really helped, and forced me to be thorough and pedantic as I used them for the assignments.

The interest towards watching the videos geared up in a slower pace but ended up with highest gain towards the objectives.

It's neither easy nor a difficult course to pursue. The presentation slides in the videos could have been visible for some more extra time as it contained lot more stuff to read. I strongly recommend everyone to do this course and I am sure you could finish it before the schedule as I did.

Helpful review and instruction on how to develop a narrative collaborative that is based on the user story, persona, and position statement. This strategy will allow for more efficient development of software to meet the end-users needs. An area of improvement is to provide a more time efficient lesson such as 30 minutes rather than 1 hour for a particular week of instruction.

The course material is invaluably helpful for anyone looking for a new approach to innovation and provides learners with a "method" or path for what often appears as magic or intuition. Assignments are a little bit too easy to complete imo and could be made harder to deepen our understanding and make information stick for the long run.

For the assignments, I think students should be given the option of picking from some offered scenarios or using scenarios from their own experience. Coming up with my own scenario made the assignments much more difficult as it felt like more like an exercise in creative writing than applying the principles taught in the course.

Overall the course was excellent. However, towards the end, the skits became a repetition of content already discussed during the lecture. Also, the mid-lecture questions always had the correct answer as the first option. Loved the interview with industry leaders like Bill Wake. Hoping to learn more in upcoming courses.

It would be nice with more than [Ted the HVAC tech] to clear things up, he is hard to relate to if you have another kind of software you want to develop.

Othervise i really like the methods and the videos, the teacher is easy to understand, he has good points and is good at explaning his material.

Very well structured course for an introduction to Agile. Topics were presented clearly and skit made the course dynamic and fun

Maybe some more activities / assignments on specific topics could be useful (would be great to have instructor feedback as well / not only from Peers)

huge course! a lot of information! a lot of useful things!

one big wish - it would be much much more easier if you can create summaries for each week of the course same way as you did for the whole courses. It helps so much!

Thank you for your great job doing this course!

This course completely changed my way of thinking. In the end, what all-important is whatever you are building should value to the customer so for that, you have to think with the customer perspective.

Alex is a great teacher and Coursera application keeps us on track.

Great course, many insights, good teacher! I just miss a better integration with the forum and the peer graded assignment journey is not optimal (but the idea is very nice). If you want to write better user stories this is a great course to start with! I recommend it.

It is very dynamic, the methodology is good, the subject is very challenging and of a lot of learning, however, in my opinion it would be good to make it more practical, every week to take short exams and deliveries with the qualification of the classmates.

Great foundation to agile and design thinking. Overall, the material was cohesive and easy to follow. It appeared that the video content and slides provided in the resources section are no longer in sync which caused some avoidable extra steps.

I really enjoyed the sessions, specially the ones with scenarios with actors, made really easy to understand the methodology, I recommend this course if you work with IT teams cause it helps to improve communication and work dynamic with them.