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.

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.

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.

This course is awesome but I had done the same course named Biology meets Programming: Bioinformatics for Beginners which was uploaded ago by these guys but it was not a specialization for that course. Or I may not say it very surely.

As a graduate student with background in molecular biology, I find the computational challenging enough, and there is some new insights in biology as well. However, some of the lectures of week 3 and week 4 are very confusing.

Good introductory course for Bioinformatics. I like the hands-on activities in Week 5. However, sometimes I do not understand the pseudo code and therefore need to read the comments shared by other learners.

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.

The course has a good material, however I consider is not explained correctly. Sometimes it is very hard to understand each topics and you need some knowleadge related with programming.

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.

Hay muchas lagunas, faltan mejores explicaciones para aquellos que son nuevos programando, mejorar los códigos aportados o explicarlos para entender como funciona cada parte del código

It was very tough and worth attempting it because I have given many numbers of attempts in all the quizzes but at every attempt, I could rectify my mistakes.

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

Основной курс находится на Stepik, здесь же непродолжительные лекции которые полностью повторяются и раскрываются на Stepik что немного странно.

After completing the entire course, I feel like the majority of it was explained well. The assignments are fair and the content is interesting.

The content itself is interesting and challenging enough. However, the wordings need improvements. Some parts were difficult to understand.

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