This is an excellent program full of helpful and interesting lessons. The instructor was knowledgeable and fun . The entire course was worth every moment and has taught me so much. Thank you.
An entertaining course, with serious deficiencies. The professor takes a minimalist approach to his lectures that borders on the lazy and is not to everyone's taste. (Personally, I found it refreshing to have a professor who did not like to hear himself talk.) For the most part though, the course depends upon peer interaction - and this is where the course fails miserably. Though you are encouraged to work in groups, the Coursera platform provides no functionality to support group formation or group interactions. Some who did form groups using other social media platforms did all their work on those other platforms and never posted anything back to Coursera, thus defeating the entire purpose of the course. It doesn't help that Coursera divides people into walled communities using some algorithm of its own so that we cannot see the work of all the learners, but only the learners in our community. There were also technical problems with the GUI that prevented learners from submitting their work to 4 of the 20 assignments. Although this problem had been flagged for more than six months it was never fixed. The one plus of this course is that unlike creative courses from Wesleyan and other universities, with the Michigan State course you can participate in all the peer review activities without buying a certificate - and the peer reviews you get in this course are no worse (but no better) than what you get elsewhere. In summary, if you pay attention to Professor Wheeler's lectures you will get a nice introduction to screenplay writing, but be prepared to put in a lot of work and don't expect too much help from the platform.
