This is the course in the specialisation where I finally gave up. I wanted to learn about bioinformatics, and apply my (admited limited) programming capability to it. But the coding element is super hard by this point. While earlier modules gave pseudocode and algortimth guides, it feel like by this point the course team couldnt be bothered anymore, and some quite hard extensions to code were tasked with a throw away one liner 'extend your code to find all paths'. This wouldnt be so bad if there was an active community of learners to chat with - but the discsion boards are nearly dead (with some forlorn messages stretching back over 2-4 years 'Is anyone else ON this course?'! Support from the course team is pretty much non existant any more. It feels like they have packed up and gone home.

(And and look out for this gotcha .... with few people on the course, peer grading can take a long time - and you pay a MONTHY subscription!)

Now, all of this is possible with legacy courses, and of itself is the price one pays for internet learning - things go out of date and unsupported - what is not OK is to keep charging people to do the course and provide no support, and not update the materials when problems are reported.

It's simply astounding to see how clearly the authors managed to explain the concepts presented in the course (and in the entire series, for that matter). I always had a hunch that this was an excellent course, but only after reading other bioinformatics materials did it become clear to me how much effort the authors put into making this course the best that it can be.

My only criticism is that the peer reviewed final challenge doesn't work very well because there are not that many participants to do the peer reviews. It took me about 1 week to finish the course, including al programming challenges, and it's been 6 weeks since I am waiting to get my work graded. A better option would be to use an auto-grader.

this course is easy understandable and interesting for the beginners!

Some content in Stepik might be erroneous...

for me this was a very intresting courde where I learined a lot about the research behind genetics especially how difficult it is to interprete the experiemntal data. I also like the mathematical background in graph theory.

Not being a boilogist I miss some extra inforamtion about the biological relevance and would like more pratical exemples before doing the final challenge which I found rather diffucult: only after reviewing my peers I really startd to onderstand the challenge.

What I also miss is the community building aspect. Therre is a forum on every page but the comment are usually very old (3 of more years) so you can't expect to have a dialogue anymore. Problems reported years ago are sill open. I also woud like to know how many learners are currently following this course.

One of the most difficult courses so far, but working hard you made it.

This was intensive, time-consuming, thought-provoking ... pleasure! I really enjoyed it, it took me more time than the schedule proposed, but it was worth it. I liked exploring things on my own, and tampering with the code/algorithms. This part of the course now assumes that you can think intelligently and will do so. Although this is a course in bioinformatics I often found myself laying on the bed with a piece of paper drawing graphs in order to fully grasp what I need to do so my code would be more efficient.

Excellent work! I'll start the next part now.

I am a math and computer science person with no biology background. This course was on Chapters 5 and 6. I loved Chapter 5 because it was all about applications of the shortest path problem. I found the Challenge at the end of the course very hard, because of my weakness in biology. It seemed to really be about Chapter 4, and a very hard problem. But a really great sequence of courses!

A very well taught course that gives you the ins and outs of sequence comparision and introduces chromosme rearrangement analysis in a succint manner. This was

Take your time, this course is harder than the others. Very worth it though, learned a lot and it was a lot of fun!

Pretty challenging course learned a lot throughout the course. Thanks Coursera for organizing the course

I have taken courses I, II and III. They were consistently excellent. I plan to go for the next one.

Excellent course and the methodology used by the instructors is very appropriate. Thanks a lot.

Overall it is a nice course. I especially like the way pairwise alignment is explained.

This course was harder than the previous one, I am happy to have made it to the end!

Interesting course but I wish that it took less time to give me my certificate.

In depth and comprehensive coverage of the topics in genetic data analysis.

One of the most challenging courses that I have done.

Very challenging but excellent walk through

Very clear step by step explanation