Introduction to Genomic Technologies

This is the first course in the new (at the time of this writing) Genomic Data Science specialization, offered by Johns Hopkins through Coursera. This course is similar to the Data Scientist’s Toolbox course which leads off the Data Science specialization in that it is scheduled for 4 weeks but really only takes a few hours to complete.

Indeed, this course is even less useful than the Data Scientist’s Toolbox, which at least had some practical aspects (installing and learning Git, for example). Here, the meat of the course is video lectures with titles such as “Just Enough Cell Biology”, “Why Care About Statistics?”, and “What is Computational Biology Software?”. The level of detail in these will certainly not impress anyone with training in biology or computer science, and most individuals (or at least those who post in the forums) come from one of those backgrounds, with some majority from the latter.

The quizzes (there are four) are very easy. Without referring to my notes, I needed a second attempt to score 10/10 for only one of them, and that was due to a silly error on my part. The final project asks you to read a Science paper (published not-coincidentally by the course directors) and to take a quiz covering information from that paper. The paper is dense but not particularly difficult if you have a biology background (as I do), and you are given 3 attempts at the quiz here as well, which should allow those with weak biology backgrounds a reasonable chance to score highly.

Overall, one star. This course was essentially useless and should not cost $49. I expect that, with sufficient complaint volume, the course will drop to $29 similar to the intro course in the Data Science sequence. I finished this course Tuesday morning after starting it Monday night and spending most of that night working on lectures and quizzes for R Programming, and I signed up for and started the next specialization course on the Galaxy platform immediately.