excellent overview of experimental methods in systems biology
Whilst a significant improvement on the dreadful first course in the specialisation, I found this course frustrating and poor in several key areas. Firstly, I am a Biomedical Informatician with several years hands-on experience and am looking to build up my skills in Systems Biology, and I hoped this specialisation would help with that. Based on the first two courses, it doesn't - at all.
Firstly, whilst the lecture videos are much better than in the first course, it really adds little to investigate lab procedures in such detail. An overview of how they work and a focus *on the data produced* and to how that are relevant to models based upon differential equations would have been excellent: this only happens in the final week! The instructor has never posted once in the discussion forums since the course began and there are issues reported with the quizzes which appear to not have been rectified - so the quality control is poor and I found for me personally, much of the material was irrelevant to my aims and objectives in taking the course.
Coursera really have missed an opportunity with this specialisation: the MIT Synthetic Biology course offered by edX is excellent, even though it requires a very high degree of background knowledge it doesn't shy away from the materials (it required too much Molecular Biology for me though it's an excellent course). "Experimental Methods in Systems Biology" *could* have been excellent - IF the material of the final week of lectures had been the majority of the coure. Very disappointing and, honestly, a waste of money in my honest opinion.
