As other users have mentioned the course lacks the expected
quality. I´d like to give as description as to why this is.
First, The first three modules are given by proffessor Yan
Zhang, she seems to be reading a text that she has just seen for the first
time, makes many mistakes, and even contradicts herself at some points, it´s
obvious that she posseses the knowledge, but unfortunatly it´s also obvious
that´s the first time she saw the paper she was reading, she even seems to be
surprised at some points. I think the university could have tried a second or
third shot when filming the classes, instead of just presenting the first shot
with all its mistakes.
Second, the course is classified as requiring an intermidiate
level, I´m a psychologist with great interest in neurosciences I´ve done
other neuroscience courses ( the three EdX courses on nueroscience) so I
thought I would classify as an intermidiate level student. To be honest
throughout the whole course many times I saw videos talking about themes
I had studied in the past, and every time I thought to myself " the only
reason I´m understanding is because I already know what they are talking about,
If I didn´t know the subject the explanation given in this course wouldn´t had
sufficed". And so, when I was faced with themes I had never studied
before, for example the role of calcium in the creation of new NMDA receptors
in the post synaptic membrane, I found myself completely lost. I had to
go to other resources to find proper explanations. Two things surprised me
about this. First, the amount of users mentioning the same problems as I was
having was astonishing, I just had to go to the forums to see every
question I had had already been asked multiple times, at the beginning I
thought I wasn´t paying proper attention, but seeing this, made it obvious, the
videos weren´t clear. The good thing about this is that in the forums you will
easily find external resources that explain the subjects properly. The second
thing that surprised me was the fact that this so complex subjects that I
wasn´t understanding, weren´t that complex
at all, and with some papers, videos or even explanations from other users I
could easily understand what the teachers were trying to explain.
Third, similar to what happens with the first three modules,
were in doesn´t look like they placed much effort in recording a proper video,
just went with the first try, its similar with the other 5 modules. These modules on the other hand are videos of
professor Yulong Li dictating a class. Once again the audio is not very clear
and the subtitles don´t help that much, they are automatically generated, so in
every video you will frequently find the INAUDIBLE word, or words wrongly
subtitled, I think every time professor Li said Voltage gated, the translation
read “wattage”. On the other hand the quizzes, in some I found very tricky but
interesting questions, in one I found a
direct contradiction with what professor Zhang said, and in others, specially
towards the end I thought I had spaced
out of the classes, the questions they were asking, I had absolutely no idea,
just to find out that some questions corresponded to information of modules
that hadn´t been studied yet, so I was trying to answer questions I didn´t
understand because they were wrongly placed.
There is no doubt I learned a lot with this course, a lot. But I
did so through external sources. The
course should be the source of learning, but in this case the course gives you
the subjects you should study and then you go to other sources. I learned I had
to learn about the role of the SNARE complex in a deeper manner, and I did so
with other videos, the same goes for many other themes studied. To finish, it
just looks as the Pekin university didn´t have a second look at this course to
try an correct any mistakes, ( there is even a class were professor Li says to
camera, while talking about the Nobel prizes, “edit that out”, not even that
they took out of the videos, did they actually do any editing? I think Pekin
university has to check a lot of this course before offering in a platform as
coursera. That being said, and reading other feedbacks I will take the advanced
neuro biology II course, knowing I will learn a lot, and hopping I do so with
the course and not through external sources.