Does anyone have recent experience with the Coursera Genomic Data Science courses? Are they valuable? Are there alternatives you'd recommend? Course listing are here: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/genomic-data-science
I took one course to see how they work (you can take them them all for free):
https://www.coursera.org/learn/genomic-tools
I actually tried to take more courses but I found the course delivery method to be exceedingly boring. Every presentation had the same setup a talking head speaking monotonously.
In addition the material that is presented is very plain and simplistic. Overly simplistic for that matter. There is a lot more to bioinformatics than just how to type this or that.
The lecturer provided so little context and so few explanations that went beyond the very basic that I was perpetually asking myself - why not just provide this information on a website or in a book? In what way is this better than a book that would contain the same information?
I think that is really what the MOOCs have not yet figured out, how to use videos and online presence to augment the learning process rather than replacing a book with something else.
Well, I did follow the same course of genomic-tools that Istvan has taken, and I learned many things, most of them new for me and some others things that have not to be done. But I was happy with it. It saved me a lot of time and give me some clues about what to do.
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I have seen subscription versions used in Computer Science topics do wonders. One learns from them in a week what one cannot in a month just reading books. WRT biology, visualizations of processes can help immensely, and rarely do I get to see quality videos explaining, say, cis regulatory modules or even the processes behind NGS sequencing.
If these existed, I'd pay to watch them because they'd be a real savings in time.