While the course did help me with assembling a good portfolio and creating an artist statement with useful contructive criticism classmate feedback which can help me with continuing the project into the future, it has several glaring issues that keep it from being more than two stars in quality.
First, the number of students who do nothing but copy and paste text from the assignment instructions and simply post a random photo, possibly using one from another person's project or takingi t from the internet as their work outnumbers the hardworking students who want to create a quality professional project. It is intolerable that this problem hasn't been resolved when it has been in existence for more than a year based on the message board posts for this course. Neither Coursera or Michiagan State University have done anything to deal with it. That tells me that it is of no real priority for either entity to resolve it.
Second, Week 7 of the capstone course is inaccessible regardless of what computer or browser is used. It will not load the portfolio posts. If a student wants their portfolio images to be seen so that the Week 8 assignment can be used with it, they have to copy the link to the Week 7 post, put it in a Week 8 post along with their Week 8 link to their submitted assignment so that other students can find and evaluate it. The problem with Week 7 has also existed at least a year or more and both Michigan State University and Coursera are aware of this based on multiple reports as seen in the message board by multiple students and yet the problem remains.
Third, it is possible to load the Week 7 posts if the Coursera app is used on a smartphone, however there are two major issues that make that only a partial solution. The photos don't download in a logical manner, they load randomly for each entry and makes the page scroll without warning making the student lose their place. Second, the posts load out of chronological order such as something posted today will be followed by a post from a month ago, then it will be followed by a post made yesterday. That is, say a post made on August 19 is looked at and then one scrolls past it down the page. The next post has a notation that it was posted a month ago. One scrolls past that, then the next post says it was posted on August 18. Then when the photos of other posts load, the student is thrown down the page past numerous posts so that they have to scroll up until they find the post they were on.
Fourth, there doesn't appear to be enough real students to evaluate the assignments as it make take days to have enough of them look at the assignment to have one's work receive a grade. Even if there are enough reviewers in a reasonable amount of time to evaluate the work, it is very rare that anyone provides feedback beyond "ok" or "good." The majorit of the time there is zero feedback.
Fifth, the number of users in the class who have no desire to learn or participate with real effort, real work, or even the desire to follow the instructions given for each assignment is overwhelming when compared with the number of students who put in the hard work to complete a portfolio and artist statement. For one assignment I reviewed one assignment from a student who genuinely cared, then reported over twenty copy-paste submissions before I had another real student who did the work.
Sixth, when one does review the assignments there is rarely a chronological order to the assignments given to evaluate. For Week 8 I had the first assignment to review as one dated for the day before. I submitted my responses and the next student was one who submitted their project a month ago. I finished that one and the next student had submitted their project two days before. Each assignment after that was a random submission date so I couldn't grade assignments in the reverse order of submission so that the most current student submissions would be evaluated first until they had enough reviews to be removed from the queue, then the next student in need of reviews based on submission date would be graded and so forth.
I ended up looking in the Week 8 message board to find the most recent student submissions so that I could grade them in reverse chronological order. Even then, if they only posted the link to their Week 8 submission, I couldn't find their Week 7 post no matter what I did to search for it through the website. I couldn't consistently find the submissions even on my phone. This leaves many students with no meaningful way to have both their photographer's statement and portfolio reviewed. I had several students with only a statement available so I graded them only on that as it wasn't their fault that I couldn't give them feedback on their portfolio.
I think that cheated them out of the evaluation process that they deserved afer they put in the effort to complete the course with weeks of making photographs, sorting and selecting, editing, receiving feedback on them, writing and revising their statements. I apologized to them for not being able to do my job in my response and told them that I evaluated them on what I was able to access. I did that for at least seven or eight assignments that I reviewed.
Seventh, the final thing that made me give this course its low review score is that the "special discounts" that were touted as being a premium benefit for completing the capstone no longer exist. I understand that special offers can expire, but none of them are valid as of August 19, 2022. None. There doesn't appear to have been any revision or update to anything related to this coure or any of the prior four courses in this specialization to account for changes in technology, software, trends, methods, or anything else that keeps changing. I would have thought that any discounts or special offers being promoted would be regularly reviewed for validity and updated so that even if what is offered has to be changed, at least there are some current special deals available for every student who completes the capstone no matter when they complete it.
Overall, if this were an in-person series of courses, I would have given both professors failing evalutions, had a very animated discussion with the chair of the department and even made a visit to the chancellor of the university for the complete lack of academic rigor and professionalism of the classes I took. I know I didn't pay as much for the specialization as I would have in real college credits. Perhaps this is a matter of you get what you pay for. That said, I was told that Coursera certificates are respected by major corporations like Dell, HP, Google, and others. Given the low quality of this specialization, one in an area I really love and have interest in, why would I take any other courses in areas of technology and business when I've seen how poorly done the photography courses are? Seriously, why would I spend any more money with Coursera when the integrity, quality, and rigor of the offerings are so questionable? I would think that a company interested in earning money from their product would care that the quality of it was substandard. There's lots of competition, even from free sources like YouTube for people to learn new skills, perhaps without a capstone project and a certificate of completion, but still one can learn the same and more without paying anything. That's something to think about and think about very intently.
