Kursteilnehmer-Bewertung und -Feedback für Statistical Thermodynamics: Molecules to Machines von Carnegie Mellon University

This course is advanced level stuff.You got to have high understanding of probability distributions and also a lot of integral calculus is required.

Great experience

Not bad, but would be better if the course could explain more on the details.

Course is very advanced. Listed as "Intermediate," but that should be interpreted as "intermediate for a graduate student in physical chemistry." Math is high level. Lectures are well-produced, but explanation is minimal, and a large number of advanced topics are covered in a very short time. Homework is poorly designed and not very relevant to the lectures, but not too hard if you stick with it. Forums not active or useful. Not a good course if you need close instruction to master many of these topics. Nevertheless, I found the course to be very useful as a survey of chemical/physical applications of thermodynamics. Great way to get a broad overview of the terrain for more in-depth future study.

Without a comprehensive background in thermodynamics (which I do not have), advanced mathematics and statistics, this course is extremely hard to impossible to follow. Formulas come out of nowhere and the explanation of the conceptual theory is very thin.

The lectures and the handouts are not very clear. The lecture does not have any explanatory information.

The content may be correct and up to date, but the lecture is just a reading of pdf files that are largely incomprehensible unless one has already taken a course in statistical thermodynamics. Every other equation introduces new terms with no basis for understanding them. This is apparently also unsupported as the discussion is not active. The "quizzes were ludicrous involving trivial questions and plug and chug questions that required lots of unit changes and no understanding whatsoever. The last quiz was not on the last module, but the whole class and was twice as long. It included a question on adsorption which was in the next module. All in all, this material will be useful for reference after I take a real stat. thermo. course. Coursera should not have this course in the catalog.