I felt like I didn't learn very much on this course. I think this course could have a lot of potential, but the course was very lacking in terms of explaining WHY things should be done. There was quite a bit of explanation of how to use the Galaxy platform, but there was very little explanation on why you should actually perform those tasks on the Galaxy platform. I felt like for the most part, I was just pushing buttons, without knowing why I should be pressing them.

End course work was too difficult. A lot of the technical details were not covered in the lectures which you needed for the exams and course work. In the end spent a lot longer than the estimated 2-3 hours for the course work, because of tedious Googling. I'd cover variants a lot more during the lectures and how to go from a RNA-seq data set to a variant caller and how to get the data from the info side of the columns. More detail please in the lectures!

The final project is TOUGH for beginners and requires you to implement skills that were not touched upon during the course. Course instructor is pretty much absent/non-responsive in the forums. Furthermore, you are supposed to grade your peers, and they you, WITHOUT an answer key in order to pass. Blind leading the blind, so to speak. I wouldn't recommend taking this course for credit. Just take the free version.

It would probably help most people to take Course 5: Command line Tools before this course, and note that you don't have to get a functioning local galaxy environment on your computer before continuing on in the course, so don't waste your time (on some systems) trying to get the local galaxy to work.

The lectures were very informative and clear. I had no problem giving the quizzes with the lectures. The project I had no clue where to begin. There has to be extra lectures included to guide the project. I hope they add some lectures as whatever lectures are currently available are

The course gives a rudimentary introduction to Galaxy. Rudimentary in the sense that it doesn`t provide enough basis to solve the course project. With absolutely no feedback coming from the instructors, that makes the course project completely unnecessary. A MC test would do.

The course need to be updated and the contents is very poor and does not prepare student to carry out analysis on his own. The course always suggest reading the documentation however the course does not help to be able to understand documentation.

This course could be removed from the specialization and just continue from class 1 into python. I do not see myself going back to use Galaxy and I was just trying to get through the course while in course 1 and 3 I am loving it.

The course material did not cover anything that we needed to complete the final exam. Although I learned a lot working on the final exam, I felt overly stressed & I had to self teach myself in order to get through it.

The project was very difficult to do and there was absolutely no relation to the subject matter covered and the project. I spent several days to complete this one single project.

This is a very good course but I took a lot of time on the final project because it was very difficult since much of the work was not covered in class.

Not very well explained concepts in the course. The project at the end is very challenging based of on what has been taught in lectures.

Nice overview of Galaxy, but does not really provide enough information for a beginner to start using it without additional resources.

Overall, I think this was a poorly designed course. What was presented in the videos were barely enough to complete the assignment.

The material is not sufficient to have a good learning experience with the Final Exam

Outdated information, not enough information to complete the assignments.

Zero support. The Galaxy page is completely different from the videos

The course does not prepare for the final assignment.

poor ! very superficial .

The cloud computing service with amazon described in the course is not free anymore. I was charged money for using it. The course also took much more time to complete than I wanted to spend. I believe a better design of the project could lead to a more efficient, less frustrating learning experience. Details below.

The usegalaxy server was extremely slow. As shown in the course, I installed an instance of galaxy in the AWS/Amazon Cloud. I was under the impression that this was a free service for the first year. Amazon has changed its interfaces and I could not do the installation as recommended. But I managed to run a few analyses with some workarounds. I did not explicitely terminated the galaxy instance for ~ 6 days. Charges of $280 accumulated.

The course project in week 4 was far beyond what was covered in the lectures. It took me a whole week, spending multiple hours every day. Many dead-end roads coupled with extremely long run times on the galaxy servers resulted in very inefficient learning and many frustrations. Help via the discussion forum was critical to design an analysis pipeline - so thank you Dejan and all contributors for the support.

This is not a course I could easily do part-time: I don’t have time to read the fine print on what is available for free on Amazon, nor do I have time to go through all of the tools on galaxy to find out what would be the best for my analysis.

On the positive side: I think Galaxy is a great tool.

Awful course. The lectures IN NO WAY prepare you for the final assignment which is supposed to take two hours. The "course" consists of really boring videos of the instructor using Galaxy and in no way teaches you anything about using Galaxy or how it works. The lectures and quizzes are a joke. You can pass the quizzes just by watching the videos. I got to the final assignment and had no clue what to do if you. I know nothing about bioinformatics, or NGS (which is why I took and paid for this stupid course) so I spent WEEKS on the final assignment and I STILL could not finish or pass the course. Whoever allows this course to still exist and waste people's time and take their money should be ASHAMED of themselves. Read the discussion forums and you'll see what I'm talking abut. DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE.

This course is very poorly done. I would definitely not pay to take the course. Galaxy seems like a very useful tool, but the course does not adequately explain how to use it. The course walks you through examples of tools - but only the bare bones - click here, now click there, etc. It does not explain why you are doing what you are doing, what any of the parameters mean, or how to choose which tools to use. I do not feel like I learned much in this course. The little I did learning during this course came from independent learning through google searching/help articles. Lastly, the tools in the videos are mostly outdated and the instructors are not active on the forums to update the information or provide any troubleshooting assistance.

This course is supposed to be part of specialization. Unfortunately this is a second course, and the first part doesn't provide necessary information on what we actually do with Galaxy. It felt like following instructions to push certain buttons.

I would only recommend it to knowledgeable people with certain background, that should be listed as a REQUIRED knowledge. I hardly learned anything, except for that there is something called Galaxy, we do some analysis by pushing buttons, using preconfigured tools. I don't have expertise to analyse data on my own... unfortunately.

As I applied for a financial help here, I won't complain much :).

The course was interesting and the videos were useful, though I think more background information was needed. Also the project was absolute bullshit. We were taught third grade math and asked to do a calculus assignment. To complete this project, I spent over a week googling all the tools used in my workflow and sought additional consultation from those outside of the course. The predicted 2h time frame for the project is completely laughable. Though this course was useful, and I hope to enact the skills I have learned, I hope that in the future this course will be redesigned with more realistic expectations.

You think this course if straight forward until you get to the project. The project is extremely complicated. It estimates it will take you 2 hours to do. No! It took me over 3 weeks. I finished weeks 1-3 and all of the videos for week 4 in one week and it took me forever to figure out how to do the project. Weeks 1-3 are a waste of your time, they do not explain anything in detail and are super unhelpful for completing the project. You need a lot of prior knowledge to complete the project. I am only continuing with the specialization because I am hoping it will help me get the kind of job I want.