Is this an educational course or an advertisement for Autodesk? You will only experience and be told of Autodesk products: Sketchbook, Tinkercad, and Fusion 360. No other design programs are mentioned much less compared and contrasted. No mention of Illustrator (vs Sketchbook), OpenSCAD (vs Tinkercad) or Solidworks (vs Fusion 360). Set up in this manner, it shouldn't require a $79 Coursera fee given that this is setup to capture new students into Autodesk's product line. Meshmixer is an Autodesk product and oddly isn't even mentioned, despite being widely used in the 3D printing community.
The course is overly focused on free-flowing design. Despite being a 3D-design class made to be embedded in the 3D printing industry, you never have a video or assignment that has you make a part or item to specified measurements. This is a real gap in the teachings; I would argue to have replaced Week 4 on sculpting with a module on adding dimensions and locking relationships and measurements (lengths, angles) between parts and components.
The class instructor, Jeff Smith, has never responded to a forum post or question in the history of the class. The fifth week of class is taught by a student rather than industry expert and he is not given teaching credit. The sixth week is empty and is used to pad the course up to the 6-week, $79 fee scale.
Two weeks of focus on Fusion 360 is insufficient given the amount of content the instructor is teaching in the videos. For new modelers, a week on sculpting feels like too much; it's nice to make pretty shapes (starships/bicycle seats), but what about shapes needing defined precision? It would be great to learn to build two gears from scratch that turn with one another. If instructor disagrees with this philosophy, at the least it would be great to use sculpt tools to make a specific item with the sculpt having some sort of goal. Making free shapes is easier but less useful after taking this class. All or nearly all of the sculpted shapes you will make would be very, very difficult to print.
Time is wasted on learning rendering - after all, this class is focused on 3D printing, not sales or marketing (the reasons the instuctor gave for using rendering).
Additional issues are below:
Course is unorganized and outdated.
- Example 1: even though this is a recent class, the Autodesk product videos are outdated. The software used by the instructor is a different version with commands in different locations. This increases the difficulty in learning. For instance, in the Create menu, primatives have swapped places with basic functions.
-Example 2: 123D Catch is no longer a product that we can use - why is there still a video teaching this in the syllabus? Why hasn't this teaching been updated? This product was taken off market a year and a half ago and still the syllabus is outdated. In the text, they state for you to download software which is not free and requires purchase (Trnio for iOS).
- Example 3: in Week 3's videos, Smith demonstrates the bottom component being grounded, but not the top component. In the homework, we are instructed to take off points if the top component isn't grounded as well - all the other students I graded got this wrong (as did I).
- Example 4: in Week 3's assignment, it says it is worth 14% of the grade. However, the syllabus says it's worth 30% of the grade.
- Example 5: T-splines are discussed heavily in Week 4 but are never defined or explained. There is a glossary entry with a link to explain T-splines; the link has been invalid since January 2017. Even splines are not defined or explained, much less T-splines.
- Example 6: Material is presented out of order. For instance, the move triad is described in Week 4 but really needs to be introduced in Week 3 when you start using Fusion 360 for the first time.
- Example 7: Lack of organization adds to existing issues of current grading system. For example, the instructions for Week's assignment says, "For this first objective, you need to build a design that uses all 6 of the primitive tools, 5 times each (box, cylinder, torus, sphere, pipe)". We are instructed to use six different tools from a list of five tools. Some students grade for five, some for six, because of the inconsistency in our instructions.
- Example 8: Every submission for Week 4 I graded was flawed; the instructor has not taught students about resolving impossible geometries. All the submissions I graded were still stuck in Sculpt mode. When exiting Sculpt, Fusion 360 would identify impossible geometries, remove them, and leave the remaining items intact that do not violate topology. This means that no assignment I graded had the minimum number of shapes - if students thought they needed 12 shapes to grade, they would make 12, but 2-4 would be impossible. Since no student I graded understood this, I suggest this is a failing of the class/instructor.
Failure of student grading system, which adds to stress when paying for the class:
- Lack of student graders when turned in on time (see multitude of forum posts asking for previous week's assignments to be graded.) Typically, students not paying for the course do not volunteer to grade assignments.
- Some students are unable to open traditional graphic image files (e.g., TIFFs) in this 3D modeling class. They flag your submission which adds to the grading probem. Another student did not understand that to peer-grade assignments, he would need to be able to copy and paste URLs / site addresses (or as an excuse to not grade). There needs to be a prerequiste statement that students are expected to be able to use basic web tools and browsers, able to open typical graphic formats, etc. The instructor could help reduce this by allowing hyperlinks in all, not some, of the student answers.
- Your fellow students grading you are obviously not subject-matter experts and do not have any more expertise or experience than you do. Regardless, they grade your material and individuals will often misunderstand and score things incorrectly.
- If you have one of these issues, you're really on your own. You can post in the forum for help but neither the instructor nor Coursera will provide assistance.