FA19: Deterministic Optimization

This course (run in early 2018) broke the enrollment clause stating "Audit this course for free and have complete access to all the course material, activities, tests, and forums". There was no midterm and final exams for Audit students. Therefore I was not able to obtain even a symbolic passing grade, despite completing all assignments that were provided to me.
Moreover the staff did not provide responses to the issues reported by the students on the forums. The issues included:

- duplicate video uploads (addressed)
- missing video parts in Week 4 Module 8: Unconstrained Optimization: Derivative Free Lesson 1: Methods for Univariate Functions (not addressed)
- possible typos in the videos (not addressed)
- missing possibility for uploading week 9 and week 10 assignments (not addressed)
- the total contribution of homeworks (25%) that did not correspond to the syllabus listing 40% (not addressed at the time of writing, 2 days before the course closes)
- regular questions asking for clarification of the subject (not addressed)

Sometimes the most grave problems, like wrong video uploads, would get fixed silently, but there was no mention about this fact by the staff on the forums. After weeks 9-11 of the course, when the assignments 9 and 10 appeared without the possibility to submit the homeworks, most of the Audit students left the course. There was a 3 week period without a possibility of submitting homeworks without any response from the staff, so everyone probably just concluded that the course has been forgotten by the staff.

The end results was that there were not enough Audit students in weeks 12-15 to obtain the required 3 peer reviews! I don't know how the course ended for verified students since they stopped participating in the discussions visible to everyone on the forum around the same time.

Multiple attempts of contacting edx support, personally the instructor of the course, and even the board of https://pe.gatech.edu/georgia-tech-online, early in the course have not improved the way this course proceeded.

Now, the presentation and choice of the subjects in the videos were very good. The discussions in the lectures were however mostly intuitive, without much mathematical rigor, overall at a decent engineering college level. The decent academic level given in the lectures is extremely rare in online courses nowadays. Some assignments were challenging for someone unfamiliar with the subject, also due to the practically non-existent practice problems, and due to the absence of the staff on the forum.

Think about this course as similar to "Learning from data" https://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html wrt. the difficulty level, but without a single helping hint from the staff, and with multiple technical issues.

How any MOOC business developer may think such practices will result in a higher number of verified students, instead of damaging the image of the college?

The course is an introduction to deterministic optimization, the topics covered range from non-constrained optimization (the most basic one) to basic algorithms for integer programming, central topics like convexity and applications are also included. Mostly Python is used for solving the problems making used of several open source libraries, MATLAB was briefly mentioned but in my opinion Python is better for this field. The quality of the lectures is very good, and the peer review assessments allow students to have a sort of personalized feedback.

I think this was the first run of the course, so there is room for improvement in a few aspects. The communication between the staff and the students is very poor, we almost never got answer from them, a number of topics in the syllabus were not presented and the order of the topics was changed in some occasions, I was particularly disappointed during the last modules.