VP
Reviewed Apr 8, 2024
This course is helpful, but it requires upgrades to the PowerPoint slides.
I zoomed through this course in 2 1/2 sittings. Intro to Seaweeds was well put together and incredibly informative! I really got a sense for what seaweeds are, the basics of cultivation, and why it's a field worth pursuing. The Additional Readings and links were really helpful whenever I wanted to go deeper on a topic from a given lecture.
A few negatives: Some of the video lecture notes had a lot of misspellings, as if they were simply transcribed automatically by sound. This made it difficult to search for species names and other highly specific words, which in turn made it harder to complete quizzes. The quizzes themselves had a few errors (answers directly contradicting video content, the occasional "Correct!" pasted within the answer text). Quiz questions could also be brutally specific, though I enjoyed the challenge. A few of the lectures were also incredibly dense with information that didn't always feel relevant unless you were already working with a very specific system or species. I almost fell off in week 2, dreading that the rest of the course would go into cellular detail about every kind of seaweed.
But I pushed through, and I'm glad I did! Week 2 is rough, but I found almost everything after it fascinating and very useful to know. I learned so much, and the presentations made it engaging. Other than a few rough patches, this course went really smoothly. I expect I'll revisit it for years to come, as it makes a great jumping off point for all sorts of more specific seaweed topics.