Seems like the patients are running the asylum in these Wesleyan/Coursera courses. The feedback is only useful when the students provide careful, thoughtful readings, which happens occasionally. If you're one of the students who commit to reading your fellow students' work carefully and thoughtfully, and work hard to communicate your impressions, you'll feel cheated when you get in return: "Interesting story. Use all your senses. More dialogue." Do any of the teachers of the courses actually read what the people taking this course are writing? I feel like it all runs on autopilot and no one really cares. Frustrating.

It would be better if the instructor actually participated.

The most important part of this course is peer review IMHO. So, I put a lot of effort and consideration into the reviews I gave, trying to make them helpful, constructive and encouraging. But it was not very reciprocal. I DID get a few great reviews, very thoughtful, very constructive. But sometimes I only got two reviews instead of three, and usually the reviews gave no criticism. One review was a single word, "nice." I got a LOT more out of the other courses in this certificate. I was disappointed with this one.

I was under the impression we would receive feedback from a qualified lecture in the Capstone, which we unfortunately did not. I also only received 2 reviews on the first draft and on the second draft (rather than the 3 we were supposed to receive). I feel that a big failing of the course in general is that you can't correspond with the people who review your work, unless they leave a comment. The lecturers drive home that it's critical to have a group of trusted writing friends to review your work and support you. I felt that some of the reviewers could have become great writing buddies in future (their feedback was so insightful), but I'll never be able to interact with them. I felt that the courses leading up to the Capstone were more informative, although suffering the same administrative problems.

I recently completed the 5-course specialization in creative writing. For the most part the course material presented was good, especially the courses on plot, on setting, and on style. The course on characterization was a little vague. From the syllabus, it looked like it would be a good course, but the instructor did not follow the syllabus and was often very unfocussed in her presentation.

The weakness with this specialization is that all the feedback to the writer is provided by peers in the course. This I found very disappointing. Many of the other students were honestly very poor writers, and as a result, the feedback I received on my assignments was very superficial. In addition, rather than being able to learn from reading the writing of others, I found for the most part that the pieces submitted by others were very lacking.

If you take this course, know that it will provide you some good information about writing fiction, but the feedback you receive on your assignments will not help you learn. You will need to find another peer group of writers to help you with that.

The quality of this course does not match at all that of the previous courses (The Craft of Plot, of Character, etc). The information provided by instructors is repetitive and except for few exceptions, not really useful.

The fact that all the work is peer-evaluated is what makes this all an almost trivial exercise. Few fellow students take the task seriously enough. Sometimes the reviews are just "ok" or "..." which is not really helpful, especially if you are honestly invested in acquiring the new skill.

Some students enrol "en masse" and don't make serious submissions, either (they submit blank pages or lorem ipsum), hoping for their fellows to grade them well, even if they don't deserve it.

It's a shame, because all aspiring writers could really use good reviews as learning tools. It's not happening.

I learned a lot from the exercises in the other parts of the specialization. To make the capstone a better experience for everyone I propose that here the reviews should be graded. Perhaps, only have each person do two reviews instead of three but have them submitted as part of the next week's assignment and rated. Everyone could rate two or three reviews. This way reviewers would put in as much effort into the reviews as into their submissions, and they would also learn how to write reviews by reading other reviews and sanding examples.

This course pushed me to the next level in writing. Especially the capstone project where everything came together in one big story, helped me a lot.Everything we'd learned was applied and for the first time ever did I understand how workshopping and sanding alters a text to the better.

I just wanted to thank everyone who helped me with their feedback. In March 2021, I published my capstone project on Amazon. I wrote “The Marvelous Misfits of Westminster” (https://amzn.to/3sCfOLp) in November 2020 during this course and I am still blown away how well it turned out.

I also started my own blog about my writing process: www.thestorytobe.com

This creative writing course really helped me a lot and changed my writing for the better. I'm definitely closer to being a writer now.

The skills that lead up to this course are extremely helpful. However, no one monitors the peer reviews. After completing a short story first draft and reviewing three other stories (as per the grading requirement), I got one review. Instead of a well, thoughout-out answer, the peer wrote "d" in the text block so that they would receive a passing grade for reviewing others.

There is no way to reach out to anyone to fix this. In the discussion forms, you are directed to go to Scribophile to review/have your story reviewed. But why would I go to another site and review more assignments when I am paying for this course and putting the work into it?

If this class was monitored to some degee, I would probably rate this class higher, but until then, I do NOT recommend it.

Content from Wesleyan was really very good. The four main faculty were excellent across all five modules including the Capstone.

Platform from Coursera makes it far to easy for other 'students' to cheat, but giving one word (or one letter!) feedback reviews. My entire Capstone submission, a 15 page pdf, was presented back to me for review by another 'student' who had stolen it - the pdf still showed my name on the property details! Coursera's response is for me to flag/report it, which seems lame. They need to take some simple steps to actually deal with people like this - it's not hard. E.g. allow students to flag a piece of substandard or joke feedback, and for submissions to be better protected. Easy, really, if Coursera invested in improving its platform.

The course has been amazing. I was disappointed with the lack of effort made by students to critique my final draft. The critique is supposed to be a 1-2 page effort. I made sure that I obliged for all other students and did a 'proper' job. This is my only complaint. I noticed on my sanding critique there was only one person who bothered to do it correctly.

I would give this five stars for the instructors and videos. I appreciated the assignments and completed a 15-page story. The problem is there are a LOT of students here who seem to not be here to learn how to write a short story and that feels unsafe (as in, are they stealing assignments for classes they're taking elsewhere or hacking something)? With my first assignment, my feedback (which was supposed to be two pages) was "good," "okay," and one semi-helpful paragraph. The assignments I critiqued were blank pages and one 2 paragraph review of a hotel in the Philippines. With my sanding assignment, I got one person who said she couldn't critique me because she didn't speak English and 2 others who wrote one letter and failed me. I resubmitted, including a statement to just move on if the reader didn't want to participate or to provide feedback if they thought I didn't pass. Allow me to quote my feedback, "q," "nc," and "d." Super helpful... I'm not submitting the final, because it just feels like the risk of exposing all my work with no benefit. I also deleted my previous assignment.

I did use the discount to sign up for scribophile. If you're serious about writing, reading others work, giving and receiving feedback, I suggest doing that instead.

For Coursera, I would suggest: 1. students cannot be anonymous (that's where the lack of work and feedback seems to come from) 2. program will not allow feedback or assignments to be submitted unless it meets certain criteria, like word count with non-repeating actual words and 3. feedback is also graded. 4. Students cannot move on in the program unless they get passing grades on assignments and feedback. I'm guessing that whomever is in here doing that isn't paying for a subscription, so I'd also suggested dropping and blocking students who are just in here messing around.

I don't know why anyone is signing up for this and wasting everyone's time, but whatever the reason, Coursera needs to figure out how to manage that problem. It's not that other students are learning and just trying to do their best, but they are actively ruining it for others.

I wasn't really sure how to rate this. I genuinely really enjoyed all the actual course material, so well done to the teachers. However, the peer reviewing was a total farce by the end. For the later submissions you were lucky to get even one review that wasn't a single letter or some bizarre cut and paste that had nothing to do with anything. As the feedback is one of the most appealing features about this program, this was very frustrating. Coursera needs to get on top of it.

Peers aren't well read.

Sorry but the variable "peer" reviews ruined this course for me, I either did not get enough reviews or a "prankster" would down mark for whatever reason they had in their head at that particular moment. the staff don't seem interested in this a a problem. and there is no way to rate a bad reviewer so they get away with it.

the other courses in the specialisation are great, but this one gives very little in the way of tuition and relies on the whole on peers, which for me didn't work out too well

This course pushes you to get your story out and gives you the experience of having your work reviewed and receiving feedback. It could be invaluable to new writers. Only four stars because there is no surety your peers will do a proper review.

The course content is excellent. I really learned a lot, and it is well structured. HOWEVER, there is no instructor feedback, there is only student feedback on your writing, and most of that is very poor. Feedback on final projects were suppose to be 1-2 pages, which I did. The feed back I received was OK, OK and Good Job. Very very disappointed in the feedback, which is a very important part of the course.

Let me start by saying this: the teachers throughout this specialization were great. I took each individual course in the specialization and learned a lot. However, the other students were less than great. This specialization places your scores in the hands of other students, NOT the teachers, in order to pass. Unfortunately, out of all the times I submitted work for peer review, only once did I get constructive feedback from another student. If you want a serious peer review, you should look elsewhere. This course is saturated with "students" taking advantage of the online platform to get an easy pass and complete the certification with no real effort. They do not review your work and simply give you a passing grade just to move on to the next part of the specialization. The remaining 99% of my submitted work was met with remarks like "..." or a simple "good" from the other students, just to complete their "feedback" without actually doing the work. My work was not reviewed for clarity or consistency, which I depended on other students to provide so that my writing could improve. Regardless, I did my best to provide constructive feedback to the students that I reviewed. It's quite disappointing that I spent so much time and effort to learn the material and no one wanted to take 10 minutes to help their fellow students succeed. Unfortunately, all reviews are anonymous so these students cannot be reported for skimping on a large part of the work. So, all in all, if you want some help with starting your learning journey, the teachers are a wonderful resource. Just don't bet on your writing actually being worth the effort when asking the other students for feedback.

The quality of the individual pieces submitted for peer review varied wildly. Those written by authors whose first language is not English were sometimes indecipherable. If an author is committed to writing in English, I think a suggestion should at least be made to have the story pre-reviewed by a native English speaker. The review process itself is flawed. It was unclear where one should post remarks, whether in the box on the grading panel or in the comments to the author. I didn't know whether the author would see my comments, so I ended up posting in both places. It would have been a big help and saved a lot of time if it had been possible to submit inline critique in the form of a word document or pdf document to be uploaded or directly on the page. The review process wasn't very helpful to me, because most of the time I didn't receive any critique of the content and elements we learned and no concrete suggestions for the improvement of my piece, only the grade.

I thought the videos were helpful on the whole. Live classes would be more helpful, though this would probably be a logistical nightmare and have to cost a lot more than the present format. As far as cost is concerned, for personal reasons, I kept having to postpone finishing up the Capstone project, so in the end I had to pay again, which didn't seem very fair. Why should my original payment expire? I'm fairly sure my being there in the background wasn't costing anybody much money. On the other hand, on my salary, paying an extra $79 dollars to get the certificate was quite steep for what I actually got out of it.

The instructor videos and interviews were excellent. However, the critiques of other students is useless if they don't take the course seriously. Most of the time, the critiques I got were an "okay," "good," or just a letter, such as q, l, or k. If you're not going to bother to take this course seriously, don't take it.