Coursera: Medieval Manuscript Class - Final Review

Well, the seven week class is finally over for me, about a week ahead of schedule.

For the first six weeks of this course, you will have a historical aspect of the class. While I knew a lot of this information presented from my past education and personal studies, some new information was presented to me. The energy of the Professor presenting this information was great, I just wish that it was more in depth with more information given. The lectures and reading were very short and did not provide as much information as I would have liked.

For the entire seven weeks of this course, you will work on a project, which can be as simple as assembling a digital collection of historical works to save on Pinterest, or working on a hands-on project making a manuscript of your own using some medieval techniques combined with modern materials. While the Professor for this section of the class is very knowledgeable in her field, she comes across as low energy. As for her accent, there is a written transcription of all the lectures beneath the video, which I was thankful for as sometimes it was hard to understand what she said.

As I worked on my hands-on project, it just kept evolving on me into a bigger and bigger project, thus the "My Black Hours Book" tab where I will continue to work on this project until its completion, which I estimate to be just under a year.

The downside to this class is that the projects, digital or hands-on, is all peer graded. This system in my opinion is very poor. There were several times when a classmate marked down my grade when in the text I specifically mentioned a requirement (i.e. Required four MS for source, "And for my fourth MS..."). There is no means by which to contest poor marks given to you by a classmate who could have just had a bad day, been super picky, or just being a jerk.

So for the content given, the class was good as I did learn much. As for the system of grading (about half is quizzes and half is projects) I have to say that this could use some improvement. There is also little to no communication with the Professors in the class, or at least I didn't see much of this.

Price of Class:

- Free: Definitely worth it.

- $47.00: Questionable due to grading system.