There is some good material in this course. The text is fairly good. But I have two main reservations about the course. The first is that the lectures do not always correspond closely enough with the quizzes, and with the text. There are times when one can take a quiz and think, How exactly does this relate to the lectures I just saw? The text has quite a few exercises, but there is a tendency to throw in one or two problems whose difficulty is an order of magnitude above everything else in that section, and I find this discouraging and a waste of time. Save those for a later course, or put them into a separate Extra Challenges section. Learning calculus is hard enough without trying to grapple without some really tricky trig problem at the same time. as a single example.The second reservation is with the instructors manner. Many students find it very enjoyable. I am not one of them. Much of the time, hes OK, especially when the camera is not pointed at him. But as the course progresses, much of the footage is of him at his desk, and the closeups become more and more extreme, the hand-waving and fist-clenching approach sheer windmilling, and the exaggerated eye-rolling, grinning and so forth become so distracting that I cant bear to watch. I realize that the goal was to avoid being a dry-as-dust droning professor, and that is commendable, but there is a happy middle ground between that and hamming. I can almost speculate that there was an impulse to add in cartoon sproing-bonk-cuckoo-klaxon sound effects. (There is actually one such sound effect, but just one, so I wont quibble on that.)I would have found the class more effective with a demeanor that was enthusiastic without being histrionic. Im sure this is one of those you either love it or hate it things, and I may be in the minority.The instructor is not generally one to throw out some concept that has not already been learned and then just motor on without explanation. He errs on the side of overly-detailed explanation, which to me is preferable to skipping over subjects or techniques and assuming you know them.Having said all of this, I repeat that there is good material, and you can learn the fundamentals of calculus for free in this course.
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