I love cryptography, and generally appreciated Allison's lectures. But I was not impressed by this class. To start, there was just too little material. Between meeting once a week and spending half of the class time on a dubious "design" project, we covered only a few topics, and only at a cursory level. The selection of topics was ok: identity based encryption, bilinear groups, byzantine agreement, differential privacy, fully homomorphic encryption, and obfuscation. However, there was no unifying theme; some of these topics are barely even cryptography. I felt like I learned a few neat cryptographic schemes, but did not come away from the class with anything else. There were no assignments aside from working on the design project. We were given papers to read; however, they were simply too long and hard to read in their entirety. I would have much preferred problems to do or more material to read on the basics. Because there were no assignments or exams, no one tried particularly hard to understand the material.
The project mentioned above was to design an interactive protocol for key-exchange. The project was well-motivated: we read an attack paper that described a real-life attack against an existing scheme, and started brainstorming how to circumvent the problem. However, after that, we got kind of bogged down. A handful of student presented ideas, but after that, progress more or less halted. Yet we still spent half of the class re-hashing the problem.