The information is good if you aren't familiar with instructional design basics. The teachers go over information and are relatively engaging, so that information can be retained. The information is pretty standard for instructional design but I did like that there was some discussion around instructional design careers. One problem is that the assessments are hard to get correct because very little information from them is coming from the course material, and you are somehow expected to synthesize the information in a manner that translates to the assessments, which does not work well at all. I only passed the assessments because I have a background in instructional design, and I had to retake them many, many times. Course questions should NOT be trick questions, and if you're an instructional designer, you should already know that! If you know nothing about instructional design, I would recommend this course, but if you already have basic knowledge in instructional design and are just looking to gain more information or different perspectives on instructional design, I would not bother taking this course.

This course surely is a "Foundation of Instructional Design".

Course only looks at the first portion of Instructional Design process, which is "Analysis". Information provided is quite basic and people already working in Instructional Design or L&D, might struggle to find new information for them.

My bain with this course were weekly tests. They are in urgent need of revision, since a lot of the time there is an unclear expectation from learner - whether we should simply recite information from video lectures or actually apply critical thinking and answer the question logically.

On one of the tests Coursera provided a "helpful" tip stating that 86% of learners fail said test on the 1st attempt. Not sure about everyone else, but to me this signals bad test design and suggests certain issues with the way information is provided.

The reason why I don't give this course a 4 or 5 star review is because it seems the administrators/facilitators of this course haven't looked into and changed the issues that learners are identifying in the discussion forum with Week 4 quiz- particularly questions #3 and #5. Either the wrong answers were mistakenly checked as correct answers in the quiz builder, or the content does not line up correctly with the questions, because there are inconsistencies with the content and those quiz questions. I spent several hours re-attempting this quiz and became very confused with the content and also very frustrated. In the end, I had to search in the discussion forum for the correct answers that someone kindly provided, or else I would've spent multiple additional days re-taking this quiz until I passed by luck.

Very useful overview of the material for people looking to explore this profession. However - and somewhat ironically for a course about how to design engaging and effective learning experiences - the lecture styles are very dry and mostly unvaried, and the unit quizzes are incredibly vague and hard to pass (make sure to retake multiple times!). The course focuses specifically on the learning theories that inform instructional design, but keep in mind that you don't get to practice any designing yourself - in fact, the course only focuses on the procedures for context-gathering and goal-setting that precede the active phases of design and implementation.

The course is titled "Instructional Design Foundations and Applications." While it lays a decent foundation of theory behind instructional design assessment strategies, there is very little application to be found in actual design and practical application. Some lectures were dry and unengaging and might have benefitted from additional in-lecture knowledge checks and summaries at the end of modules to assist with retention. Everything was spoken of with the same lack of inflection which made memorizing very similar terms for end-of-module assessments challenging.

While this course was very helpful, the quizzes were constructed so poorly that even quick 8-question quizzes might take hours to complete. "Select All That Apply" is very problematic phrasing, as it doesn't indicate how many choices are needed for the question. It leaves you having to use a side-paper to keep track of all the combinations you've tried. Passing difficult quizzes is not the instructional goal of the course. This could be vastly improved.

After finishing it I feel that as a standalone course it really doesn't cover enough content to be a benefit. It doesn't finish at a natural pause in topics, but rather feels as if it ends while you are still partway through. As it is part of a mastertrack certificate, I guess it really only makes sense to do the course if you are planning to complete the whole certificate.

I was disappointed by the lack of interaction in this course and by the transcipts for videos. Transcipts were not written using paragraphs or any text features.

In general, I believe the course was very good and helpful to understanding instructional design. I appreciate the short and reasonable assignments and class length. The content was very interesting and encouraged me so much that I had considered more course work with Coursera and even with the University of Illinois Master Track program. Until week four! The final week culminated in fifteen retakes of the quiz and bought me to a significant level of frustration. I will use question two as an example; “Learning goals should…(Please check all that apply): 1) Focus on the big picture of knowledge gain, skill development and ability/attitude change, 2) Address a performance/learning problem directly, 3) Describe the problem and gap broadly so it can be flexible depending on strategy and the types of learning environment, 4) Describe what the learners will be able to do after instruction.” The detailed notes and my previous training background gave a level of confidence I would be able to answer correctly. I chose the first two responses: “Focus on the big picture of knowledge gain, skill development and ability/attitude change” and “address a performance/learning problem directly.” These two answers were clearly defined in part one video of week four. However, the question was marked wrong! I began to work all the options of answers to get the question correct and for fourteen tries I was still wrong. I did not ever select the last of the four answers since I knew that answer referred to learning objectives and not learning goals. In week four, part three beginning at the twentieth sentence of the video lecture, Professor states, “Learning objectives are the statements describing what learners will be able to do after the instruction.” However, the only way for me to receive a correct answer for this question was to include the fourth answer which is CLEARLY WRONG!! It is not part of the definition of learning goals as outlined in the course. SO FRUSTRATING. Not only would I continue taking the quiz every eight hours for the rest of my life, there is no way to resolve such an issue or opportunity to debate. Part of instructional design is to understand the end user experience and it would do the staff good to see things from the student perspective. My constructive criticism of the course continues with:

1. The above mentioned issue with quizzes having incorrect content, specifically week 4, question 2.

2. The quiz feedback is inaccurate and inadequate.

3. No resolution or ability to resolve questions of content. My effort to highlight this issue in the discussion help form went to never-never land.

4. Only peer feedback and no instruction participation. I had a peer review that accused me of plagiarism with no proof or specific feedback. She simply stated it looked like “it was copy and paste.” Absolutely false and infuriating. The course relies too heavily on peer feedback. There should be other forms of feedback.

5. The course does not complete the ADDIE design model. There could have been one module to summarize the remaining parts of the model after Analysis.

As some of the other negative reviewers have noted, there is some serious irony to a poorly-designed course on Instructional Design (ID) that does not meet accepted best-practices standards for online education. I have ten years of teaching experience (including online) in higher education, so this critique is not completely unfounded.

Content is delivered by individuals who seem to lack any passion for the topic, and the majority of video modules are in the 15+ minutes range, which only adds to the drudgery. By about halfway through the second module, I resorted to simply muting the audio and reading the transcript: a strategy that I found to be far more efficient and pleasant than actually watching the lectures. In addition, there is a totally useless first "assignment" where you are told to find a posting for a job in ID, and then say why you chose it. Not sure what learning objective that was intended to accomplish, but I'm fairly certain it fell short.

So, is there any redeeming value to this course? Yes. The readings are useful, and some of the video content is fundamentally interesting, even when delivered with a complete lack of enthusiasm. In short, I learned a little bit more about the history, terminology, and principles of Instructional Design, but I will definitely not be taking any more courses on the topic from this institution.

This is meant to be a course about instructional design, and yet the design of this course was awful. The readings were not incorporated into the learning or the achievement lists, so they felt superfluous. The teaching method followed Friere's "banking," approach which has been proven ineffective. In fact, every module was ~100 minutes of videos just info dumping followed by a weirdly specific quiz that asked for something from 2 seconds in one of those 100 minutes. Essentially, it only tested my ability to regurgitate highly specific and silly details rather than any actual learning. One quiz had over half of the questions as true/false, which are famously bad for measuring learning or information retention. The videos were cleanly edited, but the "visuals" they used in them were really just PowerPoints with bullet-points and a lot of words (so, not visual at all). I would have preferred reading through them on my own, honestly. Basically, I got through this course, but I was stunned and disappointed that a course about instructional design by instructional designers would be designed counter to modern learning design principles.

The readings were the most useful part of this course. The videos were difficult to follow, and quite frankly, very boring, due to poor delivery. I felt that the essential learning points could have been taught in much more concise and more structured video lectures. It would have been easier for me to work through the content with slides using text only, with no speech. The video transcripts were not accurate.

The quizzes often contained elements that were not covered in either the lectures or the readings. Sometimes the wording of the quizzes was ambiguous, so it was not clear why the correct answer was the correct answer. For the final week 4 quiz, I had to retake the quiz about 8 times due to being unable to work out the correct answer for 2 out of the 8 questions. In the end, I just guessed until I got the right answer. I have no idea why the guess was correct.

While I learnt a lot, this learning came from the readings and not from the video content.

The videos in this course were difficult to follow and not very engaging. Many of the videos were largely filled with technical vocabulary and jargon, but not very well clarified or explained. As an introductory course, this was very challenging and difficult to get through. I felt as though this course could have been more interesting and had more real life application examples.

This course is a bit of a mess. The modules are not numbered correctly, the questions on the quizzes don't match the content and some of the questions are ridiculously vague. The instructors are hard to understand and the transcripts don't help with that at all.

The course present good theoretical content, however most of it lacks practical tools for the aspiring Instructional Designer. For all the cognitive and learning styles presented, the course is more a constant lecturing, in many cases without a break, an example or dynamic to it.

The Required Reading material, while good, takes several hours to get through — I spent at least 20 hours reading external content marked as Required Reading, with little to no direction.

Regarding the assessments, they are VERY difficult to complete, as there is a lot of questions of the type "Select all that apply" and, in some cases, those are not part of the content, but deductive questions, leading to a lot of trial and error, and failed attempts.

Even taking notes during the course (downloading all the transcripts and required reading material), finding the right answer among 150+ pages of content is a demanding feat. On this note, the course advises we can download the slides, which I was not able to find; and downloading the transcript of the lectures to study from gives you a plain text document that quickly becomes useless due to the lack of formatting it provides. It'd be a welcome addition if the university prepared the transcript as a formatted document, so it can be used for study/assessment purposes.

Overall, I learned a few things, but I wouldn't recommend this course unless you want some overall ID concepts.

I wish I could give this course zero stars. This is the absolute worse online course I have ever taken in my entire life. I took this course to get my feet wet in instruction design. I was deciding whether to transition into instruction design or UI and front-end development. The only positive thing about this course is that it has made me realize that UI and web design are where I belong. I felt dumb and incompetent taking this course. The videos are boring, monotonous talking heads. The quizzes are horrific. This course would make you not want to pursue Instructional Design which is a CRITICAL problem. Horrible course! I hated every minute I spent doing this!!!

As a veteran teacher looking for knowledge and experience to help me make the shift from teaching to instructional design, I found this course very poorly designed! Practice what you preach- pre-assess, engage your audience, make your slides easy to read just for starters, be considerate of timing of the videos as some are way too long to keep your learner engaged. The theory is important, but the application is what is truly valuable. Connect your instruction to real world applications- posing a project from the start and walking "students" through the steps to create and the why behind the choices would have been much more effective in my opinion.

This is a poorly designed course, which is hilarious considering the learning material. The worst offender of all are the multiple choice quizzes where you must select all that apply. The questions are worded awkwardly and are difficult to reference. Another sore point is how absolutely boring some of the presenters are. You'll find more cheer in a graveyard.

Next time, think about the people you're teaching to. I don't understand how this course went out as is.

The instructors were very hard to follow. I had to read the transcript numerous times to understand the content. They did not emphasize important or key information making the tests extremely difficult. Many of the test questions were select all that apply. This does not seem like good practice. I have taken other curriculum development courses and I do not recommend this course.

Not a very good course. The materials lacked alot of structure and sense. Quizzes didn't really match with materials. I would have liked more case materials and projects to make my time worthwhile. Presentations were so dull and boring. Repetitive and wasn't covered in the quizzes. Quizzes were unnecessarily hard. I did not enjoy this course. Would give it a zero if I could.

For a course on instructional design, I found this course to be very poorly designed. The lectures were not at all interactive and many of the videos seemed to be based on reading definitions off a powerpoint. I was disappointed by this because I've taken many other interesting and high-quality courses on Coursera. I would not recommend this one.

For a course teaching about instructional design, it is poorly designed. Especially from the assessments point. Content fill the requirements but not great.

Mostly boring lectures and poorly structured/phrased quizzes.

Questions are ridiculously tough to answer

not the course I wanted