My class, like many others, were moved online in March because of COVID-19. During weekdays, I would wake up at 8AM to eat breakfast, play Animal Crossing, and mentally prepare myself for 4 hours of lecture that started at 9AM. This had become routine for me, and I honestly loved it. Having this routine allowed me to get my day started on the right foot and, I felt good learning something new and having a purpose/task to do everyday; it felt weird and uncomfortable on days where we didn’t have class in the morning because my daily routine had to shift. So you can imagine my discomfort right before the Victoria Day weekend (mid-May) my MLA/T instructor told us that our online classes would be put on hold until further notice, and we’d only be going online to do a review before a test/ exam.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do during my mornings anymore. I only knew that I wanted to continue to learn whether it be related to the medical lab or not. That was when I decided to look on Coursera for courses to take for fun. I had taken a course on Coursera last year (The Data Scientist Toolbox) and absolutely enjoyed it since I felt that I was learning so much, I just didn’t complete it in its entirety due to personal reasons (I am planning on going back to it at some point this year). This time, I looked into taking a graphic design course, and found the non-credited Graphic Design Specialization by California Institute of the Arts on Coursera. I felt that I would not only have fun taking this course, but also learn valuable skills and understand the mindset of a graphic designer, which could ultimately help me make better MLA/T and scicomm content. So, I decided to enroll and pay the monthly fee to take the 5 courses within this specialization, and completed all 5 courses beginning of July.
I’m going to be focusing on my experience taking the graphic design courses on Coursera rather than the data science course since that experience I didn’t have the full experience of taking the course. If you’re thinking of taking courses on Coursera, especially Graphic Design, here are some of my pros and cons on taking it:
Pros
- Well put together and very informative as they focused on something new each week but also built on the knowledge we learned the week prior
- All the courses in this specialization had an assignment each week that would apply what we learned that week to something practical
- For example in the Ideas from the History of Graphic Design, we would look at and talk about designs from the 1900s, and try to understand why the designer made that design (like, what was going through their head when making it).
- You can get constructive feedback on assignments you’ve submitted
- The capstone project really helps bring together what you’ve learned in the previous courses and apply them to make up a brand development guide for a made up company
- This is great since you can potentially use it in your professional portfolio
- You can take your time when taking the course, there may be due dates, but you can move them if you need to. I ended up doing all my courses fairly quickly due to all the free time I had.
Cons
- There are quite a few people who’s “feedback” was just “good” or “well done”; just one word critiques that don’t help at all with growth
- Since there are thousands of people around the world taking the course, there aren’t any instructors anyone official grading your assignments, so you can only rely on your peers to grade you (there are discussion boards that mentors/ instructors can look out if you have questions)
- The capstone project specifically had a lot of plagiarism occurring; the weekly assignments aren’t mandatory and are only for peer review. The final submission was worth 100% of our grade
- we were able to look at anyone’s submission to do a peer review, and some people would straight up download and upload someone else’s assignment – I ended up flagged 10 submissions – three people uploaded other students assignments and one of them even uploaded the example from the first week
The cons are definitely something I didn’t like about taking a course as practical as graphic design. It sucks that some people don’t care about taking the courses seriously, not helping others out with critiques and/or PLAGIARIZING, since at the end of the day, we’re all there to learn and gain new skills. That’s probably a con in general when it comes to taking online courses on platforms such as Coursera, and the most we can do is be vigilant and flag people if they’re not following the rules.
Overall tho, these courses were very well put together, informative, and very practical with the assignments and the capstone project. I enjoyed learning about graphic design and have a greater appreciation for those who do it for a living since I never realized how much thought can go into designing/branding something. It gave me that creative push that I’ve been wanting for a while, and gave me more of a reason to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign (especially InDesign).
I’m so glad that I decided to take this course. I would suggest taking an online course with a topic that you’re interested in if you are able to!
If you want to check out my capstone project here’s the link: https://stuffomaticblog.ca/portfolio/ver-cheesy/
Or go under my “Artwork” tab on my page.
Now I have questions for you:
Have you ever taken online courses from websites like Coursera and Udemy? How did you find your experience?
If not, what would you want to study?
Thanks for reading!
Noemi’s Corner 