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

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.

For computer scientists, not biologists

Unfortunately, as often happens, what is "simple" and basic for one is not that for another. This course presumes a comfortableness with coding that I simply do not possess as a teacher of high school science. Please try and develop a true introductory course that normal, non-programmers can access. Thanks!

not for beginners

I applied for financial aid to take this course because it was supposed to be an introduction to bioinformatics that doesn't require coding. I was wrong, after struggling almost a month I have been unable to get past week 2 because the assignments require coding skills. I am going to have to unenroll and I am so pained by this because I try to finish all the courses I get financial aid for. If you are a biologist with no coding knowledge I do not recommend that you take this course.

As others have pointed out, this course is not for beginners at all, in both biological or computer science (CS) sense. For example, this course assumes students have good knowledge of string manipulation (which many biological students don't) or good knowledge of genetic basics (which many CS students don't). Especially for biological students, some algorithm implementations (in the interactive platform -- stepik) could be very frustrating like recursive calls. The professors do not explain these concepts and keep saying something like "it's Ok you don't know this you don't know that" which I found is not helpful and actually distracting.

That said, I still rate this course 5 stars, as I'm not a beginner in both senses and found the contents very appealing. I'm actually very familiar with all the biological materials the professor offered; however, I found myself know much more and deeper than before as I understood the algorithms and did some programming practice. I'm convinced that the materials are well chosen that we can benefit from switching perspectives between biology and CS. The contents are also built up in a clear path such that the learning curve is smooth (under the circumstances that you are not a beginner).

Using the interactive learning platform is an absolutely gorgeous experience; I'm super-satisfied not only because of the easily accessible format but also the comments from other students make the course lively and engaging.

The course is not for beginners at all. The course requires a previous knowledge of programming with python as they expect us to code without giving enough instructions. I found this too tough because of that.

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!

The material of the course is simply exquisitely presented. The concepts are clear, easy to grasp. You won't be a bioinformatician after doing this course, but you'll make the first step.

Excellent course. The Stepik grading could use a couple of tweaks and perhaps a bit more debugging, but it was an excellent blend of bioinformatics, molecular biology, and programming.

Excellent introduction to bioinformatics. They put a lot of heart and thought into the design of the course. I will continue to use the concepts I've learned in and out of bioinformatics.

Too confusing for me right out the gate, and I even have a little programming experience. I thought it was for beginners.

Videos and content are unrelated. Stepik application doesn't accept our answers even if it is true!

Very misleading and frustrating course. They said you don't need knowledge in programming for this "beginner" course but I find that untrue. This course is very difficult to follow for someone like me who doesn't know how to code. The pseudocode and the Stepik is even more confusing. The lectures are of no help. They barely explain anything and is very disengaging. The lecturer's accent is too thick to be able to discern. Maybe add subtitles? And then you have these quiz questions that seem to come out of nowhere. This course would probably be perfect for mid to high level programmers. Maybe change the course's difficulty level from "beginner" into "intermediate"? I wish I didn't waste my time with this course.

The course says no coding experience but every example has coding in it. If so they at least have explained basic coding but didn't. Poor explanation.

The strong accent of one of the teachers made me just leave the course after the first video, sadly.

The pseudocode that describes most of the algorithms shown in this course is very poor and misleading.

I honestly dislike the format of the project at the end of the course. I am paying for this course, and thus I do not have to be the teacher (evaluating other's people project) and I must be evaluated by a someone who really has knowledge of the topic and not by other students like me.

i am very disappointed with this course, I will not recommend it and i am not sure if I am finishing it. You should learn form the courses of Andrew Ng.

Best regards.

Dr. Andrés de Bustos Moilina (CIEMAT, Madrid, Spain)

This course is wonderful. It helps me to learn bioinformatics systematically and make my python coding ability stronger. This videos and coding challenges are quite informative, it covers a lot of materials that I could study. This course not only enriched my knowledge on bioinformatics but also extend my views on biology that some questions I never thought deeply before. So, from learning this course, I also mastered some of my understanding about biology questions. Thanks for all the teachers and instructors’ endeavor to make this course fantastic. The only thing I want to suggest is that some Pseudocode is hard to understand. For finishing the coding challenge, I also checked information from Google. I would like to say that if the teachers provide more clues for beginners, it would be amazing. All in all, thank you so much for the effort for this course.

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.