Songwriting: Writing the Lyrics vs Photography Basics and Beyond: From Smartphone to DSLR

Four focused modules move from point of view and song form through prosody (matching lyric to music), rhyme types — perfect, family, assonance and consonance — and rhythm. The object-writing exercise is the standout that Berklee graduates like Gillian Welch credit as the single most valuable thing they took away. Reviewers repeatedly say it taught them more than books or workshops; capped only because it is lyric-focused and assumes you already make music elsewhere.

Pat Pattison is a Berklee professor of 40-plus years, author of Writing Better Lyrics and Songwriting Without Boundaries, and former teacher of John Mayer and Gillian Welch. His Coursera instructor rating is 4.8 from 184 ratings. Learners describe him as a gifted, passionate teacher whose examples make abstract ideas click — the most consistently praised element of the whole course.

Free to audit the full video curriculum; a certificate, graded assignments and peer review require paid enrollment or a Coursera Plus subscription. Reddit's consensus is that the free audit alone delivers most of the value, since you can do the exercises yourself and skip the certificate gate. Hard to beat for a Berklee-grade course.

Assignments are real lyric-writing tasks graded by peer review, which is pedagogically sound but operationally the weakest part. Multiple learners hit an upgrade wall at the first assessment, and the quality of peer feedback swings from genuinely useful to abusive or absent. The exercises themselves are excellent; the grading machinery around them is not.

The tools transfer directly to any genre — songwriters from hip-hop to country report applying object writing, rhyme families and structure to their own work. It will not teach you melody, production or an instrument, so it is one strong piece of a larger toolkit rather than a complete songwriting education.

Across five courses the fundamentals — exposure, the ISO/shutter/aperture triangle, depth of field, composition, light and basic Lightroom — are taught clearly and at a beginner-friendly pace. Glendinning and Sullivan are repeatedly praised for thoroughness. Capped because several reviewers flag the Lightroom and smartphone sections as dated, and courses 3-4 as padded with off-topic chatter.

Professors Peter Glendinning and Mark Sullivan are the most-cited strength in the first four courses — "thorough", "great advice", "easy to follow". The score is held back by a recurring complaint that the instructors are absent from the discussion forums and never personally critique work, most acutely in the capstone where they "make only token appearances".

Free to audit; ~$49/month subscription for graded assignments and the Michigan State certificate, completable in roughly two to three months. Strong value for a university-backed beginner curriculum. Capped because the capstone month adds little new content for the same monthly fee and a minority called the production quality "not worth the price".

Real shooting assignments, a web gallery and a portfolio-building capstone give learners genuine practice and shareable work. But project quality is bottlenecked by peer grading: many reviewers report superficial one-word critiques, plagiarised submissions, bot accounts and slow turnaround, which undermines the feedback loop the projects depend on.

Multiple learners report going from "knowing nothing" to confident shooting, selling prints, or switching toward photography seriously. The exposure and composition fundamentals transfer directly to any camera. Limited by the absence of business-of-photography content and by post-production teaching that lags current Lightroom versions.