Object-Oriented Design

This course is the first of four in the Software Architecture and Design Specialization offered by the University of Alberta on Coursera. The course starts with a "whopper" when students discover that they are expected to very rapidly understand Android application development at an Intermediate skill level. This is NOT advertised at all in the course description. The assignments end-up requiring a lot more time than advertised and all my work colleagues that had registered for the specialization ended dropping out before the end of this first course because of this, which is truly sad.
I am sure that those, like me, that held out to the end of the entire specialization will appreciate the reason for using the Android application and seeing it evolve as new concepts in Object-Oriented Software Architecture and Design techniques are learned.
The course, and specialization, will need to be maturaed a few more iterations before earning a 5 star rating, IMHO, but it has the "bones" to get there.
Contrary to another evaluation of this course, all the UML diagrams have a reason for being in this course since it is a "object-oriented design" course after all. I would have liked to see more Sequence and Activity Diagrams presented to explain Capstone Assignments throughout the entire specialization to expand on specific User Stories that were to be implemented in the assignment.

The course is challenging and requires to go through some topics several times, do a lot of reading , exams, and, whats the best, a lot of practical excerises. By the end of course you will have solid skills in UML Class Diagrams, UML Sequence Diagrams, UML State Diagrams, Object-Oriented Design and implementation of OOP in Java. Also it requires you to build an Android Application, which was very interesting and nice for me because I have a lot of experience in Android - but this might be a problem for people, who have not worked with Android Studio before. The requriement to start the course is solid Java knowledge, therefore, I think the lectures should have made a final project in Java but not specifically Android (but again for this was great!)

Hello , thanks for the opportunity to comment and suggest. Overall I was impressed by the way videos were created, presented and built, it was interesting, gradually built and added to my knowledge.
Technical issues prevented me to participate in discussions, it was always unavailable. Also all the discussions around peer assignments were like : "Check my work and I will check yours" - that's it. People for some reason did not ask actual questions. I think such things should be forbidden and only real questions should be in discussions. There was none to ask about peer, except the course mates, and it is not very good.
I felt also that the technical level of peer assignments sometimes was too high and not fitting to the level if videos.

The course content is extremely useful. The lecture videos are very well done. I really enjoyed the interviews. The pdf notes will be will provide value to me for years to come, and I plan to distribute them to my coworkers to share a common design language. The emphasis on design prior to development is extremely valuable. The quiz and exam content are excellent.

My only complaint is about the assignments. I'm not sure why Android development was chosen for the programming assignments. It seems to add an unnecessary layer of complexity. Additionally, I did not find the assignments to be particularly challenging.

I'd absolutely recommend this course if one is willing to supplement their learning from external assignments and challenges.