Learner Reviews & Feedback for Python for Genomic Data Science by Johns Hopkins University

I like it

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The final exam was too intensive for the level of content presented throughout the course. If one wishes to maintain a sufficient level of quality in instruction to handle the final exam without wasting large amounts of time, I strongly suggest additional resources be added in order to accomplish this task. Other than that, it was a nice, very basic introduction to see how Python can be used in genomic data science. It is a bit disappointing to be this far into the specialization and not be introduced to advanced, state of the art methods for genomic data science that are used in industry or research today.

This is a quick introduction into Python for biological data. I would say there is much more to Python than what's included in this course, however the material was presented quite clearly. I had to increase the playing speed of the videos a bit, all the slow-talking was quite distracting after some time. The quiz questions were sometimes a bit tricky and I liked that. Final exam is much more difficult than the quiz questions and requires significant effort. To be honest it was a bit easy for me to pass, but that's because I've previously solved similar problems at rosalind.info.

Fairly good course for introducing basic programming skills for biological sequence analysis. However instructions for the assignments (weekly quizzes) should include some basic testing, where expected answers are given, so you can begin debugging before you answer the quiz, contrary to debug between doing quizzes. When you are getting the wrong answers it can be quite difficult to determine what went wrong, if you can't test your progress against a given example.

The content of the course is quite good, but it would have been nice if they addressed more how to make code run efficiently in Python (e.g. which structures are fast and which should be avoided). Especially during the final exam the way you approach the questions can result in a running time from seconds to hours. As in practice the datasets you will work with tend to be quite large, I think this would be a valuable addition to the course.

The course does an introduction to Python, it is well explained and contain relevant information. In my opinion, the final exercise requires more than basic knowledge of Python since they asked for a large computation of repeated sequence of length 12. New students to Python may not be able to code functions that solve the issue in small computers. For the rest, is a nice introductory course.

Well taught course about handling the basics of Python. The final course project was slightly more challenging than the lectures might set you up for and requires some additional reading and playing around with code, but leads to a rewarding finish. Additional feedback and explanations around some quiz questions may be useful to add for future.

In general the course is good. I can do some programing at the end of the course. Something I think can improve is the question in the quiz and final exam, particularly quiz 3 and the final exam. I spent quite some time to understand the definition of ORF in the exam question, e.g can I have multiple start codon before reaching a stop codon.

A great introduction course about essential python programming skills for bioinformatics works. As someone who has experience with other programming language but is experiencing python for the first time, I found that the difficulty of the course is at just the right level. I hope that there can be more stuff about biopython.

This course is a nice introduction to python for people with knowledge in genomics. However, there is a big gap between what is taught in the lessons and the final exams. Personnally, it took me ages to complete the final exam, although I was confident about what I had learnt and understood in the explanations.

I want to give it 3.5 stars. In the beginning it was great. It assumed I knew very little about python. But then it switched to assuming I knew a lot about python. I wish there were more on Biopython. I can however, read, understand, and edit code which is what I really wanted to get out of this.

Should have covered more info, spent a lot of time for the most basic and too short about Biopython. Mihaela is hard to follow and understand sometimes, too nervous in the lecture and care her outfit too much and resulting to be distraction.. Steven is great!! Thanks for the effort.

Not easy but very very good exercises, will definitely help you master Python if you take the time to understand the quiz answers. They won't give you all the info in the videos so you have to do some digging e.g. for 'list comprehension' which will show up on the quizzes

Nice course. The content and the methodology was acceptable. Like the Galaxy course, the difficulty of the final exam was brutal and I had to use other resources on the web to achieve the grade. The BIOPYTHON Tutorial was a luminous guide in the darkness.

You should give more instruments to take the final exam, I had to study mostly on my own because the material was not sufficient (at least for me, who has just started programming). Anyway, I really enjoyed the course and the topic!

It would be very helpful to have a little more coding training before the final exam. I understood what the questions were asking but struggled with coding to get the answers. Overall, great course and thank you for offering it.

For a person with absolutely not knowledge of programing its a very nice course to take. Its could be more widely explote the Biopython part, but reading the Biopython cookbook and the baisis presented here its just perfect

I like this compacted course but it sometimes looks too fast to digest. It will be better if you can divide the course into 7 weeks and describe the content slowly. Anyway, I have learned a lot from this course. Many thanks

Course is very good, although, I would say that there is a lot of python requisite knowledge required than what the course instructor told at the beginning of class. Apart from that, the course is great!

The course was great, and the material was easy to follow and understand. However, I think we need to have a TA in order to answer our question correctly so that we have correct response and correction

The lectures were very good. However, the final exam was poor with unclear instructions on how to solve the questions. Also, the final exam questions and the lectures were not very related.

Started very easy, but became quite hard at the end. Nicely structured and conveyes everything that is needed. However, sometimes I missed why specific tools have been used and not others.

You better know a lot about Python if you plan to pass this course!! Items covered in lecture are elementary. Items covered in exams/quiz's are Graduate Level!!!

good course for python but you definitely need to have some background in programming to be able to pass. recommend python course by UMichigan here at Coursera.