Creative Writing: The Craft of Setting and Description

It's not really a free class, but class-central listed it as a free course when I searched for this subject matter. I didn't know until a week into it, that I would have had to pay almost $400 US dollars to get a decent level of access. Without that access, I can't submit my assignments and nobody else can see them, so there's no opportunity for feedback and therefore less incentive to keep going.

It's eerily quiet on all the course forums. I can't quite determine whether the majority of the discussions among classmates are hidden from me because I'm not a paid member, or whether there's simply not much discussion going on right now. The welcome-threads and the meet-and-greet threads are almost entirely empty! But the stats say that there are about 350 people enrolled, including myself.

The lecture and instruction content, so far, and the exercises, are very good, though they are the sort of thing you could probably do for yourself if you have an education up to, oh, say, typical North American undergraduate level, for example. My instructor Amity Gage is a novelist herself, and she speaks to the camera well, with carefully planned professional short lectures. I find that when I set myself exercises, I often don't do them, so I take these classes to gain the incentive and the calendar structure (among other reasons). But without the opportunity to submit, that incentive and structure fall immediately by the wayside. The price, to me, is preposterous! I'd be willing to pay in the range of $20 for this kind of content, to get the right to submit and get feedback, but wow they want 20 times that much!

Very disappointed in the platform, the lock-out of people from forums (if you're taking it for free, be aware of the non-free nature of the class), and (so far) with the lack of discussion at Coursera. Very happy with the actual course content, however much of it I am allowed to access.