I greatly enjoyed the material presented in this course and while I do not doubt the proficiency of it's creators the poor standard of spoken English of its two main presenters prevents me from recommending it to colleagues. As another reviewer has remarked, their English may be quite sufficient for day to day use with other experts but for inadequate for teaching students who are hearing many technical terms for the first time. The transcripts are no better and also contain many mistakes. I believe that this course should be stopped until these problems are corrected.

Course contains very interesting information, but presentation is problematic - if transcripts wouldn't contain that many mistakes, it would've been OK.

Course assumes that students have more knowledge of microbiology than neuro science.

At least for me beginning of this course was more interesting, than several last weeks.

Boring and can't make sense of the presentation / language and idiom use.

The professor is reading long texts. It is not really attractive.

Really hard to follow/understand the lessons.

T

This course should be taught in Chinese, not English. While I appreciate the effort, and the content is useful, the structure of the course is very disorganized. Information is listed rather than explained, making it very difficult to draw connections, which is VERY important in teaching something as complicated as neurobiology. For example, the entire first lecture is the instructor showing diagrams of the brain's sulci/gyri and simply listing what the diagram shows. Ideas are not expanded upon; many times an important point is simply skipped. If you cannot understand the instructor (who is not fluent enough in English to be teaching this course in it), the notes that have been transcribed are inaccurate, i.e. words misspelled, poor syntax. I'm quite disappointed in this, as it has the potential to be a great course and I was very eager to learn from a foreign institution.

This course is a discreditation to coursera, and it's low standards are appalling. From a purely certificate based perspective, the only requirement to complete the course are completely the quizzes. They are short, and can easily be googled, or the slides can be downloaded and the answers simply CRTL+F for keyboards. There is zero need to watch the lectures ( at least for the first 2 weeks).

The lectures are terrible themselves. The English is beyond horrible, and I don't understand the modern culture of having teachers teach in languages they can't speak. It is purely reading off the slides in any case, word for word. I learned more about the basics in neuroscience in a 20 minutes lecture from a separate course, "Computational Neuroscience" than the entire first week here.

If you actually want to learn neuroscience, check out HardvardX's intro course.

This is the worst, most pathetic course I have taken online. If Peking University believes this is their best - I'll not be taking another course with them. The instructor's command of the English language is awful and the sub-titles are some help, but not a lot. Instructors are just talking faces up front - they cannot teach. They may be great in the lab, but keep them out of the classroom. I toughed out the course, but it only got worse. I had originally signed up for parts 1 and 2 of this course. Canceled part 2. The use of slides that are not clear / too small and not on the screen long enough to digest the information did not help. Do yourself a favor - avoid this course. As a side note - I have taken in excess of 25 online courses, this was the most painful.

I work with international students all day and have done for years, but this was painful to listen to. I really appreciate the effort made to present a course in another language, but I just couldn't follow along with this course. The obviously strained and slow pronunciation was so distracting. In addition, I couldn't make sense of even the simplest explanations as complex concepts were just referred to as "things" and "go like this" when we often could not see the accompanying hand gestures. The same thing has been explained in another course, and made sense right away. I highly advise anyone considering this course to take the course by either the University of Chicago or Duke University instead as I've tried them both out, and they are great.

After finishing week 1, I have decided to stick with Duke university's Medical neuroscience which is starting up again. I also highly recommend "Understanding the Brain The Neurobiology of Everyday Life" which I believe was taught by the University of Chicago. I found them to be far more engaging the viewer and the format to be much easier to follow. I found it visually disturbing and also have to keep pausing to read the slide before it switches.It's too bad because I was really looking forward to this course. It also seemed she had trouble pronouncing many of the words and I do not want to learn how to pronounce many of them incorrectly also many of the slides did not have an English translation on them.

Extremely poor quality of instruction. The lectures themselves are little more than the material being read directly off the slides by an individual with a poor grasp on the English language. The majority of the slides are walls of unclear and non-descriptive text. Even with reading directly from the slides, the lecturer is overly circumstantial in her explanations if not just outright tangential. I commend the authors for putting together a course outside of their native language but, in this case at least, it does more harm than good.

In short, this course has the air of a group of first year students giving a presentation verbatim from the slides, as another commenter also mentioned below.

Lots of good information, but the presentation is very bad. Not only are the professors clearly struggling with the English (and the material, calling anatomical planes "plates" and confounding sulci with fissures, etc), but some of the recording/video editing decisions make it less engaging and more difficult to follow. For example, the size of the images is often compromised because they chose to show the professor on the left side of the screen, even though it is absolutely unnecessary to do so.

Overall, I do not recommend this course.

The professors sound like a group of first-year students presenting a group project, literally reading notes off of a powerpoint slide. The professors also can't speak English, so instead of explaining things in depth, they have to very, very slowly read basic phrases (to explain complex subject matter) off of what's basically a teleprompter.

Really poor powerpoint presentations and videos, half in chinese. The accent of the teacher is horrible (i'm not an english-native speaking person so it's hard for me to follow english when badly spoken, so i cut off the sound and only read the subtitles.)

The content is interesting though.

I don't want to be mean, but the first week was terrible! I was expecting what it said: ADVANCED neurobiology.

I feel bad giving this review. I'm just dropping the course.

Very unstructured. The male lecturer actually sometimes says the wrong thing. The quizzes never match the lecture of the male lecturer. The female lkecturer was way better.

Very boring... The professor is just reading (with a bad English). The illustrations are also very boring...

it's impossible to understand the speech or the slides

Impossible to understand the class.