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.

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.

NICE EXPERIENCE

Great introduction and overview. Exams are especially well thought out.

excellent

Tests do not reflect course information. Even if the title is "introduction" it asumes the user is familiar with a lot of topics. It is probably good for people that just need a reminder of something that they studied previousely.

They teach basic theory and then require the student to know much more on exams. Maybe this course should be done last in the specialization. (I'm hoping the others are better)

useful

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.

Dr. Iyengar was a cool guy.

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

This sort of course will be kind of useful for sort of improving your knowledge on a sort of concepts related to some kind of areas related to sort of Systems Biology. :) That´s just an innocent joke you will catch if you complete the course. Well, the course could be very useful if you are not especially familiar with Systems Biology, as it was my case. You won't learn how to develop a model from "zero" nor how to use Matlab, but it is a comprehensive compendium of theoretical concepts supported by several well-chosen published examples. It is not easy, but it is not extremely difficult (I completed the entire course in 5 days). Thanks to Dr Ravi Iyengar for the talks and his team for the course. However, the speech should have been more dynamic and fluent sometimes, and with less "sort of" repetitions.

I did the first course in this specialization series and it was way too difficult for me as only a highschool graduate. The course is basically for advanced students who do scientific research in this system biology field. The course is enormous with a lot of things to cover in just 15 minutes lecture video. So you have to do a lot of personal reading and research for terms used by the lecturer. My advice to fellow learners choosing this course means you need to put a lot of passion, dedication and self motivation for completion of the course. So Good luck.

Though I Feel truly accomplished by finishing this difficult course and challenging myself to new boundaries where i thought I would never make it to. So Thank you Sir. Ravi for that.😁

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.

Really great course! Can't wait to learn more about systems biology!

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.

This course was very engaging and extremely insightful.

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

Indeed the course has provided me an introduction to different basic aspects of Systems Biology such as different experimental technologies and computational models. Being a pharmacologist, I was quite fascinated to go through materials dealing with its application to areas of medicine, pharmacology and therapeutics.

The course has great content, truly a powerful introduction to many aspects and concepts of systems biology. Don't let the 'Introduction' part of the title fool you though; you will only be able to complete, enjoy and learn from this course if you have a strong knowledge base of human biology/physiology. For me it might have been a bit too tough. The instructor was wonderful!

Excellent course, could be improved by explaining the more difficult concepts in greater depth, e.g. ODE and PDE math.

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!

NICE

Course material was not presented in a matter that flowed naturally. Completing the course didn't lend greatly to my overall understanding in the area though I understand certain aspects very well.

Good overview of systems biology, but the graded tests are somewhat difficult to understand for someone without a biology background such as myself.