Kursteilnehmer-Bewertung und -Feedback für Fundamentals of Music Theory von The University of Edinburgh

I learnt a lot...

Very interesting!

Its good course

Wonderful

good.

I have very mixed feelings about this course. On the one hand it was rich with content, and proved a tough challenge for the its whole duration, managing to include a great deal of theory in a short space of time. I have learnt a lot from it so I can't fault it there. However, the course is strewn with small errors and mistakes, which did surprise me as I found myself quite often confused about something only to realize it was a mistake on their part. The other aspect that seriously lacks from this course is the communication with the "instructors". I say this because the videos were clearly filmed a while back and the content is not updated. Questions and doubts take several days to get answered and it just seems quite lazy in all honesty. In addition to this, none of the exams/tests are looked at by the instructors, not even the final exam, which is in fact marked by other students. So although the content is rich and well explained, it does not really feel like an active course, rather a series of YouTube videos with a few questions added in. If you are confident that you can solve doubts and issues yourself, then I highly recommend this course, however if you are a complete beginner and want more guidance, I would perhaps look elsewhere, or at least do this course with someone else.

Pretty good in overall, but there are a few points that could be improved:

- The content is taught in a weird order and the difficulty doesn't increase steadily. For example, week 4 and 5 feel like they have been made separately and about the same subject, but week 5 goes further. The last video of week 5 is interesting, but it seems improvised...

- There could be more examples, especially from modern music. John from week 5 uses examples from the Beatles, which is great, but he's the only one. Week 3 has pretty much no examples at all.

- Suppplementary material and notes are uneven from week to week. Week 2, 4 and especially 5 have good summaries of the videos and examples, but week 3 almost only has links to wikipedia...

- The final exam is VERY difficult. There are some crazy chords and rhythm to analyse and there are advanced questions on points which have been seen very quickly in the videos.

I can't really compare since I new some of the content of the class, but I think it's weel made for beginners as well as for intermediate musicians. But you'll probably need to do a bit of research yourself if you want to be ready for the exam.

I wouldn't recommend this course to any beginner who doesn't want to start hating music. It's definitely not a course for the beginners. First of all, it tremendously lack structure. For instance: guys are talking about "Degrees of a scale" for full two weeks and only THEN explain what it is. First 3 weeks are somewhat understandable, but later on it gets so hard that it's impossible to understand without extra material. I constantly checked other sources to stupidly not get lost completely. I studied music for 7 years about 15 years ago and though I'd refresh my memory with this course, but the absence of good course structure made it almost impossible. Teachers are nice though and I still learned a lot of new things and had my "A-ha!" moments. Hence 3 stars and not 1.

The first few weeks are at a good pace in my opinion. It's when you reach the last 3 weeks that the difficulty level jumps up drastically. There are a lot of assumptions on the teachers side that the students not only grasped the previous material, but that they can apply it to future lessons as if it is a first language. I did learn some things from this course, but I was lost by the end. i think some more in-depth videos, and maybe even another week or two of coursework, would have really helped to get the information across and to stick. I felt like they spent more time teaching the basics than they did the more advanced stuff, and I feel like if anything, it should have been the other way around.

The idea of the course is pretty well organised until you arrive to week 4, when the extension of the explanations do not match the importance they give to them. In upcoming weeks, they expect yo to know a lot more that it has been explained about certain topics. Meanwhile, some videos are overlapping and going too much in depth in subjects that are not key in the development of the topic.

Also, the technical quality of some of the videos (and their audios) are a lower than expected.

To summarise, I am happy I took the course because I strengthen and remembered some concepts in which I was rusty, but I would have appreciated a better structuring of the syllabus.

The course is really a challenge and should not be labelled 'for beginners' in my opinion. Worth persisting though but no way is it 8 hours, you need to commit to additional research and reading outside of the material and be prepared for several resits if you have no formal music training or qualifications behind you. Having said that I really enjoyed completing it and valued the learning which I have applied together with a parallel guitar course also from Coursera. Thank you for this opportunity if your keen and committed, go for it.

It was good, and i learnt a lot, but it vexed me that in the first lesson they stated you didn't need to read music to get on with the course, but everything from then on seemed to require reading music including an very difficult final test reading some complicated Beethoven apparently! I understand why they did it that way, as they are used to reading music, but music can also be described as actual note names and the theory will be learnt nevertheless, without the massive barrier of having to translate it all from musical notation.

Good course covering some of the fundamentals of music theory. I found the difficulty of the quizzes to be disproportionate to the material in the lectures and some of the material could be explained better. It would certainly be a challenging course to more novice students. I would recommend "Getting Started With Music Theory" by Michigan State University as a prerequisite. The cadence of the material is a lot more systematic and incremental and what I learned in that course helped me get through this one tremendously.

Areas where uncertainties are within the course melodic include phrasing and secondary dominants. I had make use of other online platforms to gather information on these two topics. Also, I feel that the exam is too difficult. I only learned a few things from it, not a great deal. But other than that, I learned quite a great deal and I am very grateful for it. I didn't really get how the circle of fifths worked before I was exposed to this course. Thank you very much, for the opportunity.

While I learned quite a bit in this course, the quizzes and exams were a bit misaligned with the material covered. There seemed to be little direction in the way of further study other than the occasional Wikipedia link. The jump from beginner material to more advanced theory did not transition very smoothly. it would be a better learning experience to know why a question was missed on a q

The lectures were really nice and easy to follow, but the quizzes were far too complex. Many of what was covered in the quizzes were not explained in the lecture. If you are going to make the quiz more difficult than what was taught in the lecture, please improve the lecture and what is covered in it so that students can know better what to expect and what they should study for.

For me this was the first of many courses on Coursera where the quizzes and exam were way too difficult compared to the videos and reading materials. I had to find and use a Dutch Music Theory textbook to be able to understand the subject matter and to complete the quizzes and exam. My advice: more video instruction and reading material is required.

It would great if explanations could be given alongside incorrect answer choices. I'm auditing the course and got stuck on a few question during weekly tests, and I didn't know what I'd done wrong with them even once I'd passed the test. I'd love if there was a feature that explained why an answer choice is correct or incorrect.

Level of difficulty is inconsistent. There are better basic topics to cover (learning how different note lengths actually work, completing bars with notes, time signatures) rather than cadances, the extremely technical and impracticle explaination of note length values etc.

The last part of the recording or video was completely bad. you couldn't understand a word.

Some of the question in the tests were a bit out of the lecture spectrum or at lest they were not take deep enough in order to ask some of the in tests.

The lectures were entertaining and the lecturers are qualified and competent. However, I feel that they left content out which was needed to pass the quizzes and tests. I spent significant time on the internet researching the topics.

It's an upper intermediate course reviewing everything you must know already. I have basics of music theory and had to retry this course twice. I haven't finished yet. I will when I gather more knowledge elsewhere...

There is a lot of content, the course goes very quickly. It could have been structured in a better way to make it easier to approach. Some notions are discovered in the exercises, which is a bit surprising.

I enjoyed this course. However, some fundamentals could be tackled in greater detail namely chords of the the augmented sixth, these were lacking in explanation.

Very challenging course. The material presented in the lessons is not sufficient to pass the exams. You'll need to seek out additional sources on your own.