not bad but not excellent

I enrolled in this course hoping to find a balanced perspective about historical foundations for religions and other philosophies. It did include a good amount of interesting material around different systems, but there were a couple of key things that made me lose interest in the course at around week 6 out of 11.

First, I felt that the instructor talks about how he wants people to learn to think for themselves, yet I also felt that he himself preaches. Much of the evidence in his lectures is delivered as an anecdote, which might appeal to some (e.g. I could see that happening to me) and probably made the course more entertaining, but didn't do it for me. I felt that the Wade reading, in contrast, was balanced, cited other sources, and pulled in a variety of perspectives, but when I listened to the lectures, I felt that Professor Ogilvie had a tendency to state points and expect people to believe them.

Second, on a related note -- this course was not shaped for the online medium. I understand that it's cheaper and easier for universities to just use recordings of live lectures, but that meant that the lectures contained quite a bit of anecdotal rambling (e.g. going off on a tangent on how you should never take charge of somebody else's soul). Another, smaller beef I have with the presentation of the course is that when he had students who were raised under different religions come up and speak their beliefs, it took a long time to demonstrate a fairly simple idea -- despite people ascribing to the same "label," the same religion, they can have in fact been taught very different things. In a live university class, having students speak can work because the evidence is being presented by "one of you" ("you" being the students), and has the added benefit of building community in the class. But in an online class, I didn't feel that kinship at all.

I'll make a disclaimer that much of this review is about how I personally felt about the course, and about how it wasn't right for me. Some of what I didn't like, others may like. But overall, despite being initially interested in the topic and why people believe what they do, I didn't feel that the material was delivered in a way that captured my continued interest.

Not really what I excepted but others might be interested, good information.

I finished this class a month ago and still haven't gotten a final grade.

A complete waste of time especially for those of us with a lot more personal research experience and wise years behind us. If zero had been a choice, that's what I would have given this course. Don't even bother to take the course if you're interested in getting true knowledge especially about the soul.

The false comparison between religion and soul beliefs cloud the validity of the course. Maybe the intent was to only show the worst case "Soul Beliefs" then shoot them down. However, at least to me, the instructor seemed to extrapolate "some beliefs" to "all beliefs".

Too slow and not what I thought it would be. I had looked at this before and thought that I would give it another chance.

trash, its not letting go forward to the next assignment.

well taught but not what I thought it would be.

High on opinion and low on scholarship.

Extremely boring teacher

The course was choppy

not impresseed