By the end of this course and the specialization as a whole I feel that I have built up the foundation I need to my new job. Enormous value and very well put together. Some of the subjects in this course were covered in a cursory manner so one doesn't fully understand what's going on but that is understandable given the breadth.

Great course.Best online course on optics designing. Hope Coursera will launch more courses like this in future

Excellent course. Actually the content itself worth 5 stars, but I have to take one star because of poor discussion forum management and unfriendly environment of the trial version Zemax. The staff really should consider to remove these concurrent posts since it flood the update date of the forum very often, and it makes difficult to track the status of discussion posts. Trial version Zemax lacks of save function, and it is really annoying when you need to manually input all of your design parameters every time. After all, I still highly recommend this course or specialization; professor McLeod's presentation is crystal clear and prof. Sullivan's experimental demonstration is also very illustrative. It is very helpful for people without formal training to establish good fundamental knowledge in optics.