Emergent Phenomena in Science and Everyday Life

At the time of writing; this is a deeply flawed course. I started this course at the beginning of February 2016, and have finished all assignments in 5 modules that include a peer-review assignment. Thus far, I have not received any feedback for any of the submitted assignments (they appear stuck in "grading in progress" status.

Cons.
1. Course has no discussion board or forum. No way to submit feedback to the course team. Pretty unusual for most courses I've entered; and I can't imagine this is either a purposeful oversight or an accident.

2. It feels like an unfinished project -- abandoned by its developers and students alike... Only a few learners appear to have progressed through the course beyond the third or fourth week (or at least have attempted the assignments which would benefit from some support and discussion).

3. Although the topics are interesting and unique -- the material itself is quite shallow. This is really a topic taster course, with only about 20-30 minutes video for each of 5 topics. Each topic includes a separate "visiting" professor (or two) discussing their specialty, and ending with an interview with the main instructor. In other contexts this could work; but in this case its more disorienting and disjointed.

4. The learner target level is uneven. in some cases it seems directed towards a junior high school audience and in other cases perhaps a college or university audience.

5. The assignments were quite unusual, not in a bad way. But like the rest of the course, could have benefited from some support. I did feel that these were somewhat tangential to the topics for discussion... And at least for me, they were reminiscent of "junior high" type study questions.

Pros.
1. It does attempt to create an interesting frame and provide continuity to the course material. It brings the viewers into and through a real museum with some on-location video -- to explore phenomena; .

2. The main professor was an able tour guide for the short snippets where he briefly introduced each topic and provided some insight. The introductory videos tended to be engaging but unfortunately were too short to really explore topics in depth)

3. The interview sections were the highlights of the course for me. The videos were professionally shot and edited.. and although there were some moments where the scripted questions seemed bit forced... they were generally an improvement over the talking head lectures.

In summary, I liked that the course provided some alignment with a real museum. However. I felt my time would have been better served taking a museum trip. As a companion course for a museum tour it needs improvement -- I would suggest that this MOOC doesn't quite live up to its promise nor to the quality of its videos....