Great Lectures, big content, high academic level But...

Lectures are deeply dull: all but 5 or 6 (on nearly 70) are long static videos of a lecturer speaking like he/she is reading, sometimes even robot-like speeches, no cacthy at all.

Sessions are based on Peer Evaluation, but often to find peers is a problem. I worked hard to do my assignment on time, then I had to switch sessions because no one was assessing my work.

A class on Modern American Poetry and Ezra Pound was only treated secondarily? Crazy!

As well, much of my time on recommended reading was spent looking for the poetry. Why are there no links to the poetry we are learning about?

Although I'm only the first week, there are two main comments I'd like to make.

Firstly, why are the lectures sub-divided with the ridiculous, overlong, and irritating introduction for each section. In lesson one, this was repeated 11 times. What a waste of time!

Secondly, the transcripts are in rich text, which is basically unreadable, has no line breaks, which makes reading the poems impossible, and the transcripts are poorly transcribed, making them illiterate.

I feel I may not continue with the course for these reasons, even though the content is really interesting.

This is the worst presented MOOC I have encountered.....I have completed 6, and am undertaking another 2, with edxcel and with futurelearn

I am really grateful for being a part of this course. It was a wonderful experience! All professors are unique and all the lectures are thought-provoking and creative.

I don't have time and money to complete the course but this was so enlightening and a great intro to Modern American Poetry. There were a lot of things I didn't even realize I didn't know. This makes me definitely more eager to investigate more! Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Good overall review: I encountered stuff I did not know before. Just a little highbrow.

It was really hard to complete the course as not enough peer reviewers were there. Had to switch sessions twice.

This iteration of the course (August-September 2016) fizzled because so few students were actively participating. Early in the course, I worked diligently on my written contributions to the discussion forums, but then there was so little peer response that I gradually came to understand that I was mostly just talking to myself. Halfway through the course, I gave up on the forums.

But I read all the poems, viewed the videos and took the quizzes. The quizzes are lame, the poetry selection is great, and the video lectures are all worthwhile.

I had initial misgivings about some of the videos. The improvised round-table discussions of meta-poems by Dickinson, Stevens and Mullen (module 4, lesson 4) initially seemed too colloquial and not incisive, but then I realized they had value as models for how to grope into an initial understanding of a strange poem. The lecture on Hart Crane (module 1, lesson 4) was too difficult for me to follow in real-time spoken form, but then I found I could understand some of it by frequently stopping and starting the video, re-reading the lecture text in transcript, and taking long breaks for careful review of Crane's verse and for research about some of its allusions and associations. That lecture might have made more sense in purely written form, and I wonder if it was so daunting that it scared off some of the students who started the course.

As a whole, the course managed a satisfying balance between discussion of the poetry itself and discussion of the social and economic contexts in which the poetry was created and consumed. I especially appreciated the clarity of Karen Ford's many lectures and Tim Newcomb's lively and enthusiastic investigation of the role of little magazines in the 1910s & 1920s.

In depth, and eye opening to many American poets. A great mind expander and real introduction to the poetry of the Native Americans. Brilliant.

A pretty good overview of modern poetry. Very high on generalities and low on details - like detailed readings of individual poems.

The fact the the majority of the instructors just read their lectures and many of them never look up at the camera at all makes this seem very lazy and impersonal. There's very little of the engagement that would really make this interesting.

Top quality lectures, so far....