Learner Reviews & Feedback for Finding Hidden Messages in DNA (Bioinformatics I) by University of California San Diego

I have received financial aid because I was interested in the bioinformatics field and was reading alot about it and wanted to start my first course, it was my biggest mistake that I have chosen this course. It is awfully explained, terrible accent, basically a course with 50% information for beginners and 50% for coders and the quiz for week 2 just pumped my blood pressure to the roof, this course is in no way to be called for beginners and the interactive text is a mess and it is no way as a biotechnologist that I am going to recommend this course to anyone !, I need to apologize for coursera company for giving me aid for this COURSE !

note : this course is basically like a money grab, it is not enough that you are on their course they actually from Minute one advertise for their book vol 1 and 2... such a joke.

All in all I am stopping this course because the knowledge I am gaining from this course is 1 on the scale of 10, and the amount of confusion and frustration and disappointment I am getting is 10 on the scale of 10 !!

I really hope coursera can forgive my dropping out of this course and allows me to get a financial aid at an actual course

Good course, very solid community.

This course is very very good. Challenging at times. It does not hold your hand at all times and sometimes requires research to solve some of the problems, but I like the community and the approach.

Very tough but rewarding class. The programming part was easy, the algorithms kicked my butt. Love the challenge and can't wait to take the rest!!! Such an interesting field!

This course is really frustrating if you are not a computer scientist.

The 'language-neutral pseudocode' given on the computer science tasks is buggy and hard to figure out and there is no support or solutions. This course is just hours spent rerunning your code by brute force to pray you get to their answer to pass.

Work is not explained well. The only reason to take this course is that its supported by UCSD.

One of the best courser, I took ever!

Great!

A really nice course that links biology and programming

Some activities were unnecessary but coding up the algorithms was a treat :)

Loving it so far.

Really nice and clear course. The hands-on learning is fundamental to create a smooth transition between algorithms and biology.

Clear and well-formatted. No instructional support in the forums was disappointing, though.

It is really helpful!

Great content, very well structured. Loved the interactive text with the graded coding exercises.

I've had lots of fun and I've learnt some of the foundations of Bioinformatics. I couldn't expect more.

Great Course !!

Very Informative...

A great introduction to this topic. I really felt I came away from this course with some useful skills.

Cool stuff, I didn't even realize how close we are computational linguistics.

Excellent teachers, excellent assignments. My favorite MOOC so far, congrats!

Insightful and introductory course to the bioinformatics world.

great introduction!

This course was fun and very rewarding, I feel like I learned a lot about both algorithms and biology.

I have completed the Honors track---coming from a computer science background the algorithmic parts were mostly easy for me (I generally came up with all the algorithms on my own) but still fun to work through, especially because of their connection to real-world biology problems.

Interesting as the biological motivations had been they really only scratched the surface and made me want to learn more. For that I worked through the online MIT biology course [1] led by Eric Lander (of the Human Genome Project fame) that I cannot recommend enough.

[1] https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:MITx+7.00x+2T2017/course/

Well made introduction into the field. Good programming exercises which are easy to medium difficulty with a computer science background. It feels like they put a lot of thought into the course structure. Some of the biological explanations are too brief without a biological background, and I would guess the same for students without a computer science background regarding the exercises.

Excellent course. It can be tough at times but it is amazingly accessible to all who are genuinely interested. The final assignment was very well prepared and gave a real hands-on experience that puts the course into practice.