Excellent!

eXCELELENT

Was Great!

terrific！

все супер

great one

Excelente

Excellent

Excelent!

very good

¡THANKS!

Отлично

I LOVED

Good !

супер

非常有意思

great

Good

good

Co

Not being a historian of the Middle Ages, Magic in the Middle Ages seems like an accurate and well-planned course. Week 4 and week 5 were the most interesting, with week 5 delving into the knitted relationship of magic in Islam, with roots and lineages directly connected to contemporary practices of "magic" (which is something I did not know and was very curious about regarding the context of political and religious tensions evolving throughout the middle east). I would have liked more activity-based and practical instructional units on how magic and rituals were conducted, especially information on healing, medicines, and alchemy. Geomancy was the only practical component with explicit details on how to cast figures, and it needed to incorporate how it was used with astrology in a practical way. A unit on Astrology and the Astrolabe was needed as well since the videos and literature often referred to astrology, and without a basic working and understanding of how an astrolabe was used to calculate a chart, the student is left hanging on having to figure way too much on their own (which becomes rife with problems and miscommunication). The quizzes and assignments are fun but often awkwardly worded which became confusing, and can easily be cheated on. Grading of assignments was a bit nebulous and put into question others abilities to accurately and fairly grade. People paying money for course content should be separated from students not paying because engaging, stimulating, and critical analysis as discourse cannot be maintained in fidelity. Of course, the credibility of ALL courses on Coursera are at stake because little to no universities and businesses accept the certificates as valid credentials for jobs or career ladder mobility. Ultimately, one is paying for a piece of paper that is not really valued or even usable at the very same institutes that put together the coursework; and that is a very lame proposition! The final kicker is that I needed to submit highly sensitive, personal identification just to get a PDF of the certificate--absolutely ridiculous, especially considering that the topic of interest for this course neither necessitates nor warrants such high-end secure methods.

I learned how knowledge developed from Ancient Greece and Rome; how it traveled throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East; and how discrimination and heresy was used to exploit a group-think concept. It appeared to be very similar to today within politics and religion (Trump, Populism, and Israel/Palestine). Have we not evolved within 700+ years? I learned how discriminatory it was that only men had access to world knowledge. I also learned how exciting, yet cruel, it was to live in the Middle Ages based on what you believe or how you were educated. One improvement - public education!

I would change how you publish your assignments. It appear to be in several different pages on the app. Keep the instructions, the reading material and the tasks all on one page. Perhaps having a non-graded, pre-prep test to the quizzes and assignments would help with confusion. It was frustrating not knowing if I was doing the right thing because the information was scattered across the module.

I enjoyed this course greatly and significantly expanded my knowledge of medieval times and associated magic. I particularly liked that the course included the relationships of magic in Christian, Islamic and Jewish religions.

The lectures were clear and focused and always accompanied by appropriate literature ensuring that they were at the appropriate academic level.

To help with the continuous improvement of the course which you obviously undertake regularly I make the following comments.

It would be useful to include specific clarification of the relationships between

· Miracles and magic.

· The Science of Letters and magic

· Geomancy and magic

I always like to have a rubric presented before I attempt an assessment. This helps you to ensure that the assessment is on target.

I have certainly expanded my knowledge of this discipline and my experience with this course encourages my to do other courses on history.

Great course, very interesting information. A few problems I found though in the course:

1 Some of the lecturers spoke very fast. That's solvable with the 0.75 speed, but still.

2 The Islamic videos were hard to follow because it felt like information that should have been spread over 2-3 modules was crammed into one module - too much information all at once.

3 I found some of the info about Jews and magic/demons to be imprecise. It was unclear on which Judaic sources these certain claims were based on.

4 The final peer-reviewed assignment included taking notes on an image from a medieval blockbook. This particular image featured a naked figure representing the moon, which i sadly glanced at unknowingly. I think that to make the course more appropriate for all people, it would be good to choose a different blockbook image.

Other than all of these points, thank you very much for the fascinating course!

I did enjoy the course very much and learned a lot. There were some points that I think need to be improved:

- Instructions for the papers that need to be written for peer review are really not clear. For the second one, the links of the images that are supposed to be analyzed are not working.

-there is no feedback from any of the mentors to many questions. It is like everybody left the building.

If you are planning to take this course, my advice is that before you start a unit, you take a look at the questions in the forum and then go to revise the material. That will help you to understand it better. Specially on lesson 4, unless you are very known with Arab history, take a look first at the extra videos and then look at the lesson. In the extra videos you get the historical background that maybe you don't have (at least I did not) and make it much easier to understand.