I have found this a deeply frustrating experience. The main lecturer, Professor Adam Gearey, clearly knows his subject well but is a terrible communicator. His lectures are poorly constructed, repetitious and sometimes confusing. He seems at times to be delivering the lecture as a stream of consciousness rather than a properly prepared lecture: as a result he sometimes misspeaks himself, for example saying that murder trials are conducted in the High Court rather than the Crown Court, and these errors have not been picked up and corrected. I am forced to wonder whether anybody in the University of London team bothered to quality check these videos. These problems are compounded by the uncorrected subtitles and transcripts of the lectures, obviously done by somebody with no understanding of the subject. It is also frustrating that when I raised these concerns in the weekly discussion forum, I received replies from a volunteer moderator which were so badly written as to be almost unintelligible. This moderator made no attempt to enter into constructive discussion, but told me that you cannot say our professor is wrong because you disagree with him and that I should read the sentence properly: in other words, no criticism, however constructive, can be tolerated. Even some of the questions in the quizzes are carelessly constructed: for example, the correct answer to q8 in the final quiz uses the word allowed (which implies an element of discretion) instead of required, which would have properly reflected the provision in question (s.6 HRA 1998 - the authority could not have acted differently ). All in all, the presentation of this course falls far short of the academic standards I expected from a university with Londons reputation.
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