This course is honestly very interesting, but the amount of homework and projects can be overwhelming if you don't work ahead. Prof. Ernst taught the second half of the class, and he was a bit quieter and less engaging then Eskin (though not for lack of trying). That said, I do think that by nature of this class, simply going through the material without asking the class every other slide to answer basic math could be helpful, plus it would make the 200 slide presentations go by a lot faster. Still, Ernst goes through the material very thoroughly, and if you're really into genomics research, I think this class will be quite useful. Even then, I think learning the concepts Ernst teaches (HMMs, intro to EM algorithms) is much more useful than those taught in the first half (which feels like a bunch of leetcode questions that I likely won't ever use).

Note, you have to buy the $80 textbook so just be aware of that.

If you're looking for an easy CS class, this is the one. Our midterm was so easy that the median score was over 100%. The final was also very doable. The only problem is that he is not a good professor, so you're going to have to learn through the website. Still, the website is really good at teaching you the concepts and preparing you for the exams.

There were two professors that taught this class (Bogdan Pasaniuc and Jason Ernst), switching off every week to cover topics that they are experts in. The content is interesting and more importantly, it exposes you to relevant papers in Bioinformatics that may not be in the same line of research you are conducting (if you are in CompBio research). The 7 homeworks were graded based on participation and were fairly simple and short, released on Tuesday and due on Thursday (of the same week). There was also a final project, for which they provided many sample projects as well as allowing you to make a novel project off of your research. There was one mini presentation on your chosen project in week 7 (5 minutes) and the final project presentation was in week 10 (10 minutes). There were no exams and overall was an interesting and low workload course. (The professors are also super nice and are willing to answer any questions you have)

Grading:
Participation: 20%
Homework: 30%
Final Project: 50%

Course content:
Week 1: Overview / Final Project
Week 2: Clustering / Classification
Week 3: Ancestry Inference
Week 4: HMMs
Week 5: Disease Mapping
Week 6: Regulatory Sequence Modeling
Week 7: Initial project presentations
Week 8: Genetic Risk Prediction
Week 9: Graphical Models
Week 10: Final Project Presentations