By Laura Cushing from West Berlin, New Jersey 6 months ago Completed (Partially)

Your basic run of the mill course. No interactivity between professor / staff and studnents. All matterials are lectures, with power point presentation. While I was able to learn from this and did pick up a lot of writing tips I didn't know before, I didn't feel motivated and engaged enough in the course to attempt the essays.

Watching the videos pretty much provided all the practice I felt I needed to grasp the concept. The weekly 'homeworks' gave extra practice, but the grading system made them very difficult to gauge.

By Kav from Warsaw, Masovian Voivodeship 6 months ago Completed (Partially)

A very good course for anybody in the science field. I got to lo learn a lot of tricks and techniques which have definitely helped me in viewing "boring scientific journals" in a whole new way. (Everytime I read something jargonny and boring, I want to lash out my red pen and start editing it). I wish we all change the way we write, it will just be more fun to read for everyone. A big fat thank you to Kristin Sainani and all the other members of staff for all their effort and time. I have truely been infected ;)

By Carol Colffield from Sao Miguel Arcanjo, Sao Paulo 6 months ago Completed

Outstanding course and outstanding Professor! I will never write or read the same way I used to do. The course far exceeded my expectations and I would love to see a second edition soon. Thank you to Professor Sainani, to Stanford University and to Coursera. You are truly writing the future!

By Ricardo Teixeira from Antwerp 3 months ago Completed

Writing scientific papers is a skill that every scientist must learn. It doesn't come naturally, as most people believe - the language and structure of papers are very peculiar, and there are certain expectations that reviewers and editors have that we'll sooner or later clash with. This course is a magnificent piece of work. It explains very clearly all the basics (and even some advanced tricks) needed to write quality papers. More than that, it gives the essentials for quality writing in English. It includes lots of training (writing and reviewing other people's writing), so it's very engaging. The best thing I can say about it is that after taking it I looked back at some papers I had written as a young PhD that were rejected by several journals - and now I know exactly why. They look like school reports and not like scientific papers.

By Henry 5 months ago Completed (Partially)

The best thing about the course are the 3 interviews with the outside journal editors.
The good thing about the course is most people will learn something from it.
Unfortunately, the instructor needs to learn English grammar.

By A/Prof Jenna Mead from Perth, Western Australia 5 months ago Completed

This course is a tough call: a very diverse group of students with widely varying needs, as expressed on the class forums, from students wanting to improve their English to graduate students looking for help with drafting chapters to professional editors looking to establish a network to professional academics checking out a Humanities course in MOOC-format. So, it would be hard to cater to the expectations of all these groups.

Other reviewers have noted the course's positives for them: practical instruction on how to edit; setting standards for scientific writing in journals; encouraging reflection on their own writing. These are significant successes and I don't want to diminish them in the slightest.

My interest was in the content, use of technology, experience of assessment and, crucially, sustaining attention. I also have a research project in scientific writing and I was looking for another perspective. So, my interests are narrow and partial but MOOCs are for everyone, right?

The course satisfied my last interest most successfully: I've not edited a scientific journal so it was illuminating to watch the instructor doing the hard yards on the page. I also appreciated watching an American editor at work. My field is English language and it's endlessly fascinating to watch how English differs across the cultures in which it's used.

At the risk of sounding churlish, may I be frank about the other points? I found the content very limited. "Good writing" is the high aim but, as the peer reviewing exercise showed, there are many different kinds of writing in the sciences. So it would have been useful to look at writing in a range of journals, from a range of disciplines and a range of genres.

The technology is (mostly) pretty good: Coursera has invested heavily in the platform and it's paid off. Two suggestions, though: a video lecture that goes over 15 minutes wastes the potential of online technology. The instructor knows her material and is convincing but anyone talking online, in the same pose, the same manner and, often, reiterating multiple examples is going to lose the audience. Second, one of the flexibilities of online — and a big selling point for the format — is the student's ability to sequence and progress at an individual rate. So, locking down the modules week by week is a disincentive.

I'm a big fan of peer assessment and, in this case, students had the chance to get their hands dirty and do some editing. I spent a lot of time on this part and reviewed more assignments than required. But without supporting rubrics or some kind of scaffolding it's a lottery and the risk is a dive to the bottom, rather than the middle. The research I've read on this topic supports this argument. I accept that the embedded quiz has the advantage of immediacy but — forgive me — it's not checking whether I've "understood the preceeding material," it's checking my capacity to remember what the video just said.

That said, I'm very grateful to have done this course. My interest was really sustained, though, not so much by the material or the format but by the questions the experience raised for me both as a researcher in scientific writing and as a professional academic. Humanities courses are not immediately suited to online modality. Coursera's Daphne Koller hit the nail on the head when she called MOOCs "data-drive" rather than "hypthesis-driven" learning. So, there's a significant challenge for the Humanities where it's all pretty much hypothesis-driven knowledge.

I imagine that an area like this one might be sequenced with, say, this course providing a general introduction and then one or two others that develop by being more specialised. One of the instructor's real skills is technical precision and another more specialised course would provide more scope. This course would then become the pre-requisite for later courses.

Thanks for the opportunity to review this course; thanks for the opporunity to *do* course.

By Krista Garver from Montreal, Quebec 5 months ago Completed

This course is tailored for people just starting out in the sciences, but many of the topics and exercises could be useful for anyone who wants to write better. The concepts are presented clearly, with plenty of examples, and Kristin Sainani is an engaging lecturer.

The writing assignments in this course are done using peer review, and I found the system more useful than for other courses. Rather than just grading essays using a rubric, you actually edit the other essays in a mini word processing program. It takes a good deal of time to do thoughtfully, but I found that I learned a lot from the exercise. I would like to see more peer review systems move in this direction -- perhaps not to actual editing, but beyond the basic grading rubric.

By Daniel Baneni from chatham, New York 5 months ago Completed (Partially)

Professor Sainani is brilliant; she is a genius. If anyone out there still doubts that we live in a special era of equal opportunity education, such doubts will fade away after taking this course. Great praise to Stanford and coursera for making this possible.

By Lynsey from Dublin, Ireland 6 months ago Completed

An excellent course, with many useful tips. My writing style has improved immensely already. If only I could have done this course before writing my masters thesis!

By Amy 6 months ago Completed

This course brought a very diverse group of students with different expectations. I learned a lot more than I had hoped and these skills will improve more than just scientific writing.

There is no professor/student interaction (although the professor posts on the discussion board) so if you are expecting to be hand-held this course is not for you.