Computational Social Science Methods

I’m so confused by all the glowing reviews of this course. Am I taking a different course than everyone else?

Perhaps my style of learning differs from most, but I’ve found this course ridiculous at times (with multiple in-video quiz answers revolving around silliness like, “Wait, I wasn’t paying attention….!!!!” And full of grammatical and spelling errors, I’m assuming to mimic text speak.

Casual doesn’t even begin to describe the teaching style. It’s hard to follow the instructor as he goes off on tangents that have nothing to do with the course. There’s a lot of repetition for things that don’t require it (like what we’re going to cover). If you’ve got epilepsy or can’t handle lots of flashing, don’t watch the videos - there’s a lot of it, unnecessarily, from stock images.

I repeatedly felt like I was in a science world presentation for youth with lots of smoke bombs and “ooohs” but it all covered up the actual knowledge. I can’t imagine this course would ever be taught at university… and if it was, I’d ask for a refund.

I ended up reading the transcripts of every video and ignored 90% of it. Much of it was nonsensical. I understand the main instructor has English as a second language, which I love, but the phraseology left much to be desired. I’m older than the instructor, but I felt like I was back in high school with the “cool teacher” who just wanted to be liked, and did anything to keep students engaged with a topic that isn’t particularly engaging.

The difference here is that anyone taking this course chose to; we all need measurable skills to take away from a course and specialization like this. Smoke and mirrors, off topic and meandering 18-minute videos don’t cut it.

I very much like the format, the collaborative contribution of the various experts in this intertwined field.

The only change I would recommend for future iterations or similar efforts (not always possible but was the only real technical issue I noticed) is better audio capture for guests. Professor Hilbert's audio was perfect, but all the guest lecturers sounded much worse (far away, echo/talking in a box or fishbowl) by comparison. Not unintelligible but definitely less clear.

I noticed a few discrepancies (typos) in some of the quiz questions and in the pop-up questions during the lecture videos.

One issue I had was repeatedly failing the quiz for module 3, even though I was paying very close attention to the lectures. After my second attempt (also failed) I noticed that even the same question with a different answer was not correct but my understanding was not the only issue: the way the question was formulated and the answer options that were provided did not match the language used in the lecture being referenced. In an 8 question quiz, with an 80% passing grade, this means that even if I understand the concept but don't see the right words used in the lecture describing the correct answer, or the question is posed in a way that is deliberately misleading from how the topic was described in the lecture, I fail.

This is bad pedagogy and is frustrating for the student. I'm fine getting it wrong and having to try again. But being penalized for a bad question or confusing answer choices, then further penalized by having to wait 8 hours to try again, and likely having to review the information a third time, for a concept I already understand, is frustrating and discouraging.

I hope I won't see any more such issues (though I did spot a few in the pop-up questions in the video lectures).

That is the best course I have ever took through Coursera. Professors are very very enthusiastic about what they teach, course content, links, quizzes, and assignments (peer-reviewing and web scraping) are highly helpful and informational. I felt like I was taking this course at one of the UC Campuses by engaging in the classes, listening these amazing professors, and communicating with others who got this course as well about peer-reviewing process. I felt like being a student at one of the UC Campuses. And I felt like I am taking this class online just because this is the pandemic time. It was amazing! I also took notes during the course. Now, I have a small notebook for this course. I am hoping to take more notes during next courses and have a very informative handbook/notebook on CSS. The content you taught gave me a lot of creative ideas to me about my research. I believe this is the best course I have ever taken through Coursera. Unlike the other courses in the platform, I felt that the professors care about us, they really want to teach us! Just wow! I would like to use this review as an opportunity to thank all of the amazing professors! I stalked all of you and checked a couple of research you have. I am impressed by all of you. Thank you! Please keep creating such amazing contents for students who would like to learn more about CSS and computational research, like me :) Thank you, again.

This is a rather intense course. There is a lot of information to take in, especially if you complete all the optional/complimentary materials (there is an entire textbook to read at the end of module 1!). However, it is worth it. I have thoroughly enjoyed the practical elements of the module (web scraping and playing with machine learning tools), and I like the way they implement humour to help motivate you and keep the tone light. They also discuss some interesting studies and their findings. I might give my head a rest for a day or two before starting the second course as listening to an hour or two of lectures everyday is a lot. In both my masters degrees, I only had 2 x 2 hour lectures per week, with the rest being self-directed learning and assignments.

Excellent course to have a high level understanding of what Computational Social Science (CSS) is and the methods used in the field including Machine Learning, Social Network Analysis, Agent-Based Simulations among others.

The course provides many insightful ideas. I particularly liked how they link the concepts of agent-based modelling with social emergence or explain the limitations of predicting human behaviour exclusively extrapolating past data into the future.

I really enjoyed the collaborative nature of this course, with the contribution of multiple experts in the programme. All the lecturers deliver the content in a very engaging manner and provide extremely relevant examples to show how CSS methods can help us to better understand society.

Thank you for producing such a great course!