Speak Freely, Think Critically: The Free Speech Balance Act
Deep Teaching Solutions · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Dr. Terrence Sejnowski, Greg Lukianoff, Dr. Barbara Oakley, Cristina Koppel
Social SciencesPersonal Development
About the course
Imagine being lowered in a basket from the walls of Damascus to meet a conqueror whose brutal power shaped history—but who paused to debate what makes societies thrive or collapse. That’s how our exploration of free speech begins—with a story that proves the power of ideas can challenge even the mightiest rulers. Today, we face our own pivotal moment in the fight to protect and understand open discourse. In "Speak Freely, Think Critically," you'll uncover: ◦ The shocking ways AI and socia
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (no upvotes, 3.0★).
“Most of the animations were worse than unnecessary. It's annoying to be told to "picture this," only to then be bombarded by the output of GenAI.”
Coursera's 4.9 comes from 34 ratings. Of those, 0.0% are 1–2★.
Starisk reads the reviews learners voted most helpful, and weights each by the square root of its votes: a review with 80 upvotes counts about five times one with 2. Unvoted reviews are not skipped out of laziness — by this model they carry no evidence that other students endorsed them.
That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗