Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Systems Biology by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Ravi is a great researcher. This class is taught with great clarity and expertise. Subtitle is much less impressive though.

This is a good course, overall - it starts off with a lot of technical detail about network, but I honestly encourage anyone to keep going with it as the second half of the course is full of really interesting material on signalling networks and modelling, and having finished it, I certainly feel much more informed. However, the assessments can be tricky - they often require rote learning of specific detail from the lectures (often, detail which isn't highlighted a particularly important). They also occasionally involve difficult to understand questions, and several questions have had spelling or grammatical errors.

However, overall, I'd recommend this if you have previous undergraduate education in molecular biology, and a general understanding of how cell biological systems work.

Although I am thankful to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Ravi Iyengar & colleagues and especially Coursera for providing the such courses online,

I have to say after taking this course that I did not find this helpful and would not really recommend it to anyone. The course is sort of a bird's eye view of the field of systems biology such that a beginner would not understand much of anything and an experienced researcher would also not really benefit from it either. In my view the course is sort of a "Review of certain handpicked literature" and it does not Explain well the basic concepts of system biology.

A good introduction to this topic for sure. As others have said, this is perhaps more like an "advanced" course than intermediate (I already have a masters in biochemistry and a lot of programming experience) but for me it's perfect. He does talk slowly though so I've been increasing the play speed to 1.5x

Dr. Iyengar was a cool guy.

An exceptional course for anyone interested in the area of bioinformatics, cell biology, biotechnology, etc. I think it is very valuable to have some background in molecular biology but if you are interested, do not doubt to take it.

This course is difficult. Often very difficult. Sometimes extremely difficult. However, the assessments are reasonably accessible for someone who is not highly experienced in the relevant fields (i.e molecular biology, biochemistry or mathematical modelling). I enjoyed the course tremendously. The content of the course was stellar, and delivered to me exactly what I was hoping for from this course. When I first began the course I was quite surprised at the level of detail (this is my first time using Coursera, and I had thought the course would be a lot more "fluffy" or "wishy-washy" than it was). The level of detail was paired (almost always) with a description by Ravi Iyengar which was simple and captured the main "take-home" points. This I imagine is only possible thanks to the eminence and experience of Dr Iyengar and the hard-work by the rest of the team behind the scenes. Many aspects can be a little daunting (I did not understand anything with great deepness, I often did not understand things very much, but I rarely did not understand things at all - thanks to the emphasis on take-home points). I think an essential course for anyone who wants a taste of all things systems and networks.

fascinating, difficult, and interesting course. Thanks so much!

A good step to learn this area.

It's a challenging subject. Don't expect to walk away from the course with a complete grasp of systems biology. However, this course is a fantastic place to start.

It's really a nice introduction of system biology. I have learned a lot of new ideas.

Professor Iyengar is quite interesting! Still I hope more mathematical details can be included!

Great course! It explains very generally but clearly all different aspects involved in Systems Biology. The material used is good and so are the articles used for learning.

This course was very engaging and extremely insightful.

NICE

Nice course, a little boring at the beginning with so much data about cell signaling, (kinases names, and specific routes).

Very very very interesting!!! First step in a new field.

It's very helpful!

that corse was really beneficial and useful for me. Thanks a lot

nice

Very useful course in order to learn the basics in systems biology. You only need some training in biology to understand the concepts but the course is easy to follow and very complete.

3rd week and I am loving it! :D

The required readings are stellar. I didn't know all this stuff, and there's a real open-source philosophy. The bio stuff is challenging for an engineer like myself, but worth Googling and learning in the long run

very good

Excellent

An excellent introduction to Systems Biology. I studied electrical engineering for undergrad and neglected to take more than the single biology course that was required, so I was a little unsure of how the course would go. There are actually many parallels with systems biology and engineering, so most of the material was intuitive or could be easily fitted with my previous knowledge. I had to spend additional time for nomenclature and rechecking exam questions to make sense of the answers, but the class is organized in a way that you can actually acquire the information you need to build a foundation and be able to consider what researchers from various backgrounds are concerned with.