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.

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.

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).

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!

I really liked the course, I had fun finishing assignments and learning the theory behind each concept. However, I take my time very seriously and this course has underrated the time you should devote as I end up having too much pressure due to other work I should be doing.

Very nice course and information, but backend could be more polished. Many tasks (expecially about randomized algorithms) could fail even if you do 100% right. And very little debug information provided.

Fascinating subject where informatics and biology come together . By taking these courses you get a deep understanding of how research results are obtained by multidisciplinary teams.

A good course and introduction. Some of the computer graded homework assignments need better explanations for the desired result set, to avoid frustration.

Very interesting lectures and practical assignments. But in my opinion the capstone project is not too interesting for "computer" people.

I couldn't finish successfully last question but I don't know why. I believe I understand the meaning of the question

The answers are stale. MEME tool results don't match what they expect. It takes a while to find students to review.

Есть недоработки, но вместе с комментариями других учащихся, можно разобраться в сути заданий

The two platform format is quite complex. But the material is excellent!

The course was very informative, but at points it was very confusing.

Very well explained for both biologists and computer scientists.

Good Course but at times difficult to understand.

The course is great!

E

To be completely honest, I was expecting more from this course. One big setback is that the course material does not really go into biochemical fundamentals of what is going on, and instead jumps straight into algorithms. This might work for someone with enough background in biology who needs to learn to code. I, on the other side, have already had some exposure to software development and algorithms, but when Pavel mentions gene expression and transcription I have a very vague idea what he is talking about.

Instructions are often not clear and require you to read the comments to even grasp what the problems are asking for. Also the format for teaching is to teach you a bad way to solve a problem then go "well that didn't work out, lets try a different way." I felt these were a waste of my time as I sat around trying to understand why I was being asked to solve a problem in such an inefficient manner.

The course is basically abandoned. The figures in the interactive text don't show up and the are very few people available who can grade your assignment. There's no support left in case you're stuck.

Some of the algorithms are pretty cool but overall the course is not worth it. The material is pretty weak.