_:n10b9b7039c054ed6b64e0f480395c948xb9
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"Professor Marc van Oostendorp has woven a lovely and living web of an introduction/refresher to Linguistics for anyone with the beginning of a serious interest. His enthusiasm and outright love of the discipline are infectious and are filtered by an evident and generous humanity.  This works especially well in his choice of guest speakers who are without exception a joy to hear.  He ties it all together at the end with William Labov's wonderful retrospective, showing the student that one doesn't have to be a follower of a particular school of thought to appreciate how its proponents generously pour their discipline, experience, skills, love and humanity into what they are doing.  In so doing they, as well as the good Professor, share the essential lesson:  approach language with all the scientific discipline you can muster but always keep in mind that it is something human, mysterious and very much alive, and always changing.  Something that cannot be caged.\nWhy only two stars? One star off for each of the following:\nFirst, it is too light and the required readings too short and too easy.  Furthermore, there is an over focus on certain topics, especially politeness theory and speech errors, which doesn't really go anywhere.  Other topics, such as approaches to syntactical analysis, cognitive linguistics, etc. could well be further explored.\nNext, the structure of student participation should be enhanced to require much more lateral work (of better quality) among and between students currently taking the course.  Much of the recent input was appallingly poor, leaving one with the impression that participants where just ticking boxes.  \nFinally, and most importantly, is the failure of the course on this commercial platform.  The student receives many emails urging the purchase of a certificate or of other courses, but the course itself is not kept properly updated.  It contains many errors that have not been corrected for quite some time.  Most are not very important, but some, including a few patently incorrect quiz and exam answers (which have been cited and admitted in the Forum but not changed), are important.  The student has, in effect, no way to check where s/he might have gone wrong.  The student gets no up-to-date feedback.    The course was free, a kind of teaser for the commercial product, but that gives Coursera all the more reason to keep it updated, to keep on improving it.  One gets the impression, as things now stand, that Coursera cares about the money a little too much.  That it has  missed the balance between the search for profit and the search for meaning.  \nCoursera is letting this course, a lovely living thing, slowly die on the vine.\n<text />Jack Kennedy"
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