This course is good

Excellent course

excellent

good

As physics courses go, this one is good but not great. Which is to say, the prof does a good job explaining the concepts but has a tendency to dive into complex examples without giving basic examples first. As others have stated, this means you'll have to do a fair amount of searching the internet for other resources to supplement the provided course material. It is possible to pass the quizzes and progress even without understanding 100% of the material.

There are some really useful nuggets of information about first-order optical design, which are explained well and often (after you've got past the basics of the first couple of weeks of material). This course gets to be quite rewarding from week 3 onwards. I do recommend it despite its downsides.

Generally good, but some things should be described more detailly. For example, sign convention should be explained better, especially for mirrors. And in some tests the questions appear that were not discussed in the lectures, such as microscope, and it's necessary just to use some formula without deep understanding in this case. But as a whole the course content is interesting and really seems to provide a set of powerful optical design tools.

The course gives information on basic optics and ray tracing, as well as more involved formulae for systems of thick lenses. I appreciated the various approaches that are presented, analytical, experimental and numerical. More than anything, the introduction to optics studio is very helpful, and I will definitely follow the next courses to deepen my knowledge of optical design.

I got to learn about ray optics and all the basic mathematical tools needed for an optical system design. Also got a hands on experience with Zemax OpticStudio. The assignments and homework problems are really good. But the best part is the capstone project at the end.

G​reat content, although some questions in the quizes could be formulated in a clearer manner to avoid confusion or ambiguitiy. Overall a good experience and opportunity. Thanks to the instructors for creating this course.

Great content but the provided learning resources are limited to the video lectures and exercises. There is no staff helping in the discussion forums. Question hang there without answers for months.

The first week was a lot of derivation which was rough to get through, but the course became much more applicable in the following weeks and I learned a lot of useful concepts.

One inconvenience is the windows software. But I mainly aimed to study the mathematics and it is quite helpful with all the explorations needed with the problem sets.

Well made course. clear lecture. removed one star because lecture note is not sufficient to cover all the concepts. Need more reading materials.

Excellent content and instructor, but, resources for this online course are a bit limited. Getting the OpticStudio software was a challenge.

Really valuable introduction to optical design, I learned a lot! It takes dedication though, but it's totally worth it.

Assignments are difficult and the auto-grader is a bit buggy. But the course content and the faculty is great

Excellent content and instruction. Difficult to get feedback on problems with software and quiz answer input.

Great content and teacher.

The course evaluation needs some debugging and problems should be better explained.

Good course, beginning is a bit too elementary but later part is very educative.

it is little advance and in my view not well explained

Its ver good course for beginners like me

Challenging and good!

ok. a bit easy

Some things in this course are very cool, others not so much. The fact that it includes OpticStudio is awesome, so you can practice with the program as you do the course. Also the selection of topics is good.

As for the bad points, the first is definitely the allocated time. As a minimum you'll need twice as much as the indicated, and that is an info that you're not aware of before paying. It's not just me, I did the course with a fellow researcher and we both had the same issues. And the thing is, after completing the course with 77% grade I am far away from having the feeling of dominating the subject. I feel like there should be a selection of solved problems (not just a couple, and they should include typical optical devices) in order to help to master the knowledge. Many people master by doing, and in practice there is little chance to make these knowledge yours if you pass from one thing to another fast, without having a good deal of practice. In fact, before starting with the next course I will search for some design problems, like telescopes, microscopes and all that stuff, and solve them both by hand and with OpticStudio to feel comfortable before continuing

Informative but frustrating. I thought there would be more focus on OpticStudio, but this was only covered for one week. Dumb errors like repeatedly calling a "principal ray" (or axis) "principle" on powerpoint slides (potentially embarrassing for international students who might not know better)... Lots of quiz questions are ambiguously worded... Presenting equations as though systems in vacuum is a given... The pace of the course suddenly doubles in week five... I really think that this course would be drastically improved if it were accompanied by a lab of sorts that was more focused on OpticStudio -- giving the math a practical application that more closely mimics what the real industry looks like. Class could use a once-over to remove errors, ambiguities, and dated references (to websites, etc.).