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This course gives an overview of the main themes in the origin story of the universe, the solar system, earth, life, and the humankind. This is a grand journey, and necessarily the course moves very rapidly touching on only selected topics. However, I personally struggled to keep up with the torrent of information that was presented, especially given my lack of background in this area. Often it felt as if the course focused on the trees instead of the forests. I found myself losing touch with most of the information of a lecture as soon as the lecture was over. It's challenging to pick out the important pieces of information from the ones that are not. There is no doubt that the educators in this course are experts in their fields, but I felt that sometimes they were oblivious to the challenges faced by complete strangers to their area. Perhaps Coursera could stretch out this course over a series of courses, each examining a specific topic at a more leisurely pace? But even so, it's very useful as an overview. I think this course best serves as a scaffolding for us to build on further with specialized studies. I expect to build on this foundation further in the coming months and years, as I piece together for myself the story of our origins. This course is a great start to that journey!

I think the course structure could be made easier to follow. There is a lot of jumping about in some sections, which can make the flow of ideas more difficult. However, the scope of the course was amazing and it whetted my appetite for things paleontological! In most Sections I did a great deal of background research on the internet to get more information to help me understand some of the ideas. I like the honesty of the lecturers. They dont present evolution as a fait accompli - in fact quite the opposite. They acknowledge many significant gaps in the fossil record, and often point out that everything is hypothesis and theory, which changes steadily over time as new discoveries are made. Thank you for stimulating my interest over the summer period.

This course is almost outstanding. Half of the presentations are top-notch reviews of the relevant highlights of their subject matter. Half of the rest are logical, but somewhat perfunctory reviews of similar sets of highlights, and finally, the other quarter are sadly hampered by having no visible organization, with delivery that could only have been improved by rehearsing the narrations a couple of times before the lecture was videotaped. I give most praise to presenters Connelly, Pope, Eibye-Jacobsen, Sørensen, Cuny, and Dahl. These lectures alone make the course eminently worthwhile.

I enjoyed this course immensely! I was a bit hesitant due to its length, however, the content was usually manageable and mostly interesting. A couple of the weeks, the lectures are quite lengthy and dense while others were a bit dry. Also, I think the week about bacteria could use a little more explanation. I feel as though I didn't really understand those concepts until watching that week's as well as the next week's lectures. Finally, the quiz questions for the third to last week were a bit confusing and didn't match well to what the instructors actually said.

Thank you so much for this course, I really enjoyed it!

I only gave 4 stars because sometimes it is really hard to understand, especially key words (I am not talking about the accent but the group and family latin names, etc); I constantly had to check the subtitles for these.

To be honest I wasn't expecting this content after reading the course title, but it was nice to see evolution from this point of view, great job!

Enjoyed course. Was not what I expected from the name of the course but I enjoyed it anyway. Found climate information interesting. Instructors English was generally correct, however I found some hard to understand because of enunciation issues. PS: I am a retired electronics engineer with an advanced degree who is interested in how everything works.

Would have given you 5 stars except for the enunciation issue.

E​xcellent course, with plenty of detailed information, challenging but very enriching. Some teachers not so proficient in English, sometimes the quality of transcripts is not perfect, and some resources like maps and diagrams shown in the videos could be made available as separate files. But overall, for a free course, this is outstanding.

A wonderful and informative course! I learned about evolution from a lot of different perspectives and fields of science! There were a few points where I wish things had been explained a bit more slowly/carefully/thoroughly, but otherwise I had a very good experience.

Seemed to diverge from the original premise in week twelve with the evolution and radiation of bird species. The development of life forms that resulted in Homo (X) seem to have been skated over rather quickly. But over all I have learnt a lot.

Really informative course, the reason why I rated 4/5 is because the lecturers read much too often from the teleprompter. Obviously they all know the material very well but reading it off a screen doesn't feel very natural.

Excellent program (5 stars). But most teachers were clearly reading a script, with little or no graphic information, which made retaining the information practically impossible (2-3 stars).

Overall, great overview of Earth's history! Found the end pretty fry when looking at biodiversity. Would have preferred to look at biodiversity of other species besides birds.

Great course with so much information. The instructors explain the themes very well, perhaps it needs a laser so signal important points in each slide that is been presented.

Excellent course on this topic. I have really enjoyed the process of learning and the knowledge I gathered during the process. More importantly, it has broadened my thinking.

Great course, a clear and complete introduction to the different aspects of life evolution on earth.

A great base to start from. Thank you,

Roberto

Excellent and informative course - a great deal of factual information packed in. Very well presented by a range of experts in different fields.

A very interesting course with a broad spectrum.

Some of the professors might work a little bit on the pronunciation of English!

Did not want to take this course for credit. Basically watched all of the videos.

Found it very interesting and informative.

It's a marvelous course. But it has one problem, the pronunciation of instructors are much herder to understand.