Interesting

nice course

it was nice

Very clear!

Super cool

very good.

Amazing!!

Excelente

Great!

na

This is certainly not a course for beginners! The content of the course were rather complex and prior computer science knowledge is extremely helpful to finish this course. It was a struggle for me to finish this course without any background in computer science. However, it was definitely challenging and gave me an insight on how two different disciplines can be connected in a single field of study. The only improvement I could think of is if there were videos regarding the basic computer science knowledge that could have helped biologists such as myself. Perhaps giving an example on how things are done could be useful. There were only a handful of examples and the examples only gave the answers but did not explain how to get that answer well enough.

Great course. Good introduction to applying computer science to real biology problems. Only cons to this course is that it tries to split the line between biologists wanting to learn more bioinformatics and data scientists wanting to learn bioinformatics which boils down to the coding being tough and at times not well explained and there not being enough explanation for the biology part. I wouldn't take this if you don't have any coding skills because without working through the coding challenges the course isn't useful and for those with what would be more novice coding skills (like me) be prepared to spend a lot of time on this course. Well worth the challenge.

I found this course incredibly enlightening and because I feel so highly of it I'm going to buy the accompanying book. My one issue is with peer evaluation of the final assignment, I don't believe in peer evaluation in situations where the peers may not be trained. What if one of the graders don't understand why they have a question wrong, despite having seen the answers. I don't think such a person should be allowed to perform evaluations. That being said,all the algorithms and the explanations behind them, super interesting and because I have taken this course and learned what I have, I am now considering graduate school in this field.

The authors are funny guys and the explanation of material is solid. However, I found programming tasks not specified properly. I found difficulties in understanding ~25% of tasks and I had to read comments to get the task properly. In addition, there are lots of dependencies on syntaxis output which has nothing to do with answers and material understanding. Poor biologists who attempt to complete the programming section. It has to be improved (and there are tons of ideas on how to improve it in Stepik comments ). Just improve the programming part and the course will become invaluable!

I enjoyed and learned a lot from this course. I have no background in biology or computer science. My recommendation would be that there are more examples and explanations and problem-solving activities that do not require programming. This is my first Coursera course and I realize I could have benefitted more from hearing and speaking about what I was learning. It would have helped me answer the short-answer questions of the project. I hope to complete the specialization and have already started the second course.

I took a JHU course on Galaxy, which used high level tools and wanted to learn more about the algorithsms. This course helped me with that. Knowing Python definitely helped and made this course relatively easy. Most people with some coding experience will find this informative but easy. I dont know if this coursewould be useful to a person who does not have knowledge or access to some basic programming tools (The course makes the claim that no programming experience required)

This is a really good introduction to finding motifs - thank you!

The main thing I feel could do with some attention is the automated marking of some of the assignments, particularly the final one on Week 4, where only 7% of submissions are marked as correct because the probabilistic algorithm only gets the expected answer some of the time. There is also often inconsistency on expected whitespace (really, who care about insignificant whitespace).

Very interesting. I learned two important concepts about DNA during this class. C-G skew due to a more likely odd of mutation; and how to find motifs in seemingly random DNA strings. However some pseudocodes need some improvements. They sometime have part that only make sense after you read comments by other students, or variable names that could be better chosen (I wrote a comment at that place).

Great course, but it absolutely requires experience with python so I was unable to complete it as I have only a biology background! Also, the quiz questions are terribly formatted and you will require multiple attempts to figure out how to put the correct answer in the format they require or even understand what they are asking, they should include practice quizzes with guided explanations.

This course is good for foundations, but a lot of the information is outdated. I learned a ton from it, definitely still worth taking. You absolutely need to learn to code for this course. If I had not had programming experience, I would simply not have been able to take the course and learn anything practical from it. Very interesting and good practical data and examples for practice.

It may be more helpful to students who are not taking the honors code if they had access to ready made programming codes to complete the stepik exercises as it is extremely taxing and not feasible to solve all problems by hand.

Brilliantly structured and very effective learning method!

I also felt that Gibbs sampling could have been explained further or more in detail.

Thank you!

Excellent course. Excellent tutors. I am a fan of stepik.org and this course. However, the only thing that I consider redundant in this course is peer to peer assignment; and I guess solution here is to reduce number of peers who must review the assignment. I think 3 peers are enough to grade the assignment.

But everything rest is top!

Great course! Really liked the instructors and the online tool to follow along with concepts and coding challenges. There were a few points with vague instructions that took some extra time to figure out. Would definitely recommend this course but it will be more difficult for people with little to no programming experience.

Even if quite hard, contrary to what is said at the beginning, this course challenged my biology knowledge whilst introducing me to the fascinating world of algorithms and coding. I'd recommend starting an introductory course on biology meets programming before starting this adventure.

Content-wise it was great. I got quite disheartened by the peer graded assignment: the majority of the submissions I graded just copied the rubric. There needs to be a negative grade for cheaters - but I think it better that we don't have peer-graded assignments in the first place.