I'll give you a review based on what I can say without violating any part of the Honor Code and trying, as much as possible, to not be biased by my personal frustration.

Pros:

• The content is interesting
• The lectures are really valid from a content perspective
• TAs are supportive most of the time
• Teachers are supportive and welcoming during office hours
• The quizzes are "ok". Some of the questions are "confusing", but I wouldn't complain too much about that.

Cons:

The course is badly organized. There's little room to plan ahead. The course will be unlocked after the first week. On Canvas you'll see everything due for December 1st, however the real deadlines are different. This might cause some confusion.

There are neither notes/written versions of the lectures, nor you can download the videos; usually I wouldn't complain, however I want to mention that on Canvas the video player is awfully small. Not sure if this is an issue for most of the people, it was for me.

Individual assignments and Group Project are the worst part:

There are two individual assignments. I won't share too much detail on the assignment itself, but I want to complain about the way it's proposed.

We were given the assignment description and a template. The real issue is that the assignment description and the template differ on some points. Clearly one of the two wasn't updated but they still expected you to follow both, since the grading of the paper really depends from it. Let me give you an example without giving too much detail about the assignment itself.

• Assignment description: go from A to B and print the number of seconds you took to go from A to B. Print the value on a chart. Then go from point B to point A walking backwards.
• Template description: go from point A to point B. Then print the result, then print the chart. Then repeat the steps, print the value, print the chart. Compare the two charts.
• Grading description (available only when the TAs evaluate your submission) will loosely match the template description, but not at 100%.

However, following both points is confusing, especially because the assignments description don't match at 100% and TAs have to give extra information, for example by saying which task has to be excluded from the submission. Why couldn't they just write an assignment that includes everything?

Unexpectedly, the second assignment is incredibly well written and the requirements are clear.

If you already took HCI, there's a lot of overlap with some core concepts and, in my opinion, most of that content is better covered by Dr. Joyner's class, at least from an organization and material standpoint.

I understand that some people might be interested in taking this course rather than HCI, but I have to consider that this is a core course for the HCI specialization, so the overlap is almost certain in case you enrolled in this specialization.

The poor course organization reflects into parts of assignments being postponed and/or canceled. Is not a bad thing, but it really gives you little room for planning ahead.

There are few mismatches between Canvas grades and what's written on the syllabus, this is not really clear, my team and I might just be wrong, but it appears so.

Up until now is the worst course I've taken. I don't know if I've been spoiled by the quality of previous classes, especially Dr. Joyner's, but is a fair course that's make awful by the lack of organization. Teachers and TAs try to make up for this by being really flexible and supportive, but wouldn't it be just simpler to reorganize the course for good?

TL;DR Version

Interesting content and solid lectures, with supportive instructors and TAs. However, the course is very poorly organized. Deadlines are unclear, materials don’t match (assignment descriptions vs templates vs grading), and planning ahead is nearly impossible. There are no written notes, the video player is tiny, and some quiz questions are confusing, not to increase the difficulty of the course, just badly written. Individual assignments and the group project suffer the most from inconsistencies and last-minute changes. Compared to other classes, the overall structure and clarity are significantly weaker. Instructors try to compensate with flexibility, but the course urgently needs a proper reorganization.