Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence

Prior experience on this subject: none:

As an engineering student, I've always enjoyed this kind of subject, so I decided to enroll on a MOOC about it, since there was no way I could get formal education at this point and felt that reading a random book on my own wouldn't be the best option.

After completing all the assignments I must say that the course title is misleading, what it is really about is how should you help yourself and others to find which future do you want to have (so to say) and why is that important in organizations (all backed up by studies, which I found to be very interesting).

If you engage in this course, be prepared to: read ~3 articles/week, engage in forums (which are part of the evaluation, because of lack of time I didn't do this and probably that damaged my learning) and reflect on yourself (which was also a bit hard to me, since it's hard to define a future path if you still hadn't touched all the subejcts of your area of study, I ended up not doing that particular assignment - but there are many others, around 10).

There's also optional learning assignments which suggest you to practice what you learn on real people and then evaluate the results, which was something I did not do (unfortunately, due to my social context it was hard to find people willing to participate) but found to be very interesting.

I started this course after experiencing some very poor examples of emotional leadership in the workplace, and optimistic that the course might generate some ideas. In reality, the contribution from some students, on the Signature Track, was disappointing on occasion. For me, the low point came during the course 'interview' task. Firstly, using a conversation in a moving vehicle as an example of 'best practice' for inciting PEA was laughable. Secondly, the suggestion that students would only qualify for 'distinction' if they completed this unrealistic and unregulated exercise made a joke out of those of us who had invested heavily in the course until that point. It was as if Coursera were prepared to reward mediocrity, no matter what the quality of the end product.

The course did generate some useful ideas, for which I'm grateful. Regretably however, its overall value was diminished by an unrealistic exercise and some very peculiar scored of student contributions in forums. In my opinion, writing 'yes, I agree with that', hardly constitutes academic excellence.

In summary, a very good basis, upon which a very good course could be built. It's not quite there yet however.