Quantitative biology workshop, MIT

MIT's 7.QBW's winding down. I'm not sure what to think about it.

On the one hand, it's nice to get to grips with some biological problems with the tools actual computational biologists use. As usual, MIT do things seriously, the syllabus is impressive, the lectures are great and stimulating, etc.

On the other hand, it's very frustrating − we only get to lightly touch on to some very basic concepts. I can't really say I've learned anything of substance; most of the “workshops” have been, by necessity, hobbled by the idea that primarily biologists would take the course, with little to no competence in computer programming. And so, to review a number of languages and tools in a very short time, everything is kept very basic, very introductory. Only once so far was there a really interesting problem (the MATLAB one on neurological analysis).

A quick trawl through the forums show that basically there are two populations − the biologists who find the programming assignments very hard, and the programmers who breeze through the course and are frustrated not to do more biology.

I guess the course's ambition makes it a bit of a tightrope exercise; maybe the MOOC format isn't so well suited to that kind of course? I guess people would have found it more satisfying if the course had been either an applied programming crash course for biologists, or a biology application aimed at software people. Then, by excluding one half of the prospective population, they could have gone deeply enough to teach actual skills and knowledge to the other half.

On the third hand, by applying standard expectations, we are reading this wrong. It's not a “course” and it's not meant to teach skills'n'knowledge. It's a workshop, based on an outreach program. It's aimed at giving people a glimpse of what can be done in the field of computational biology − and in that respect, I'd say it's pretty well hit the nail on the head.

But then again, it's pretty frustrating to get a glimpse of something cool and not have any way to reach towards it. If MIT created a systems biology course or sequence of courses, then this workshop would be the best possible introduction to it. On its own, it's kinda… unfinished.

PS oh, yeah, of course, I'm going to ace the course. But for the reasons explained above, I have no real merit in it.

Update 2014-08-02: yay, here's my certificate:

(Yes, I shelled out for the Verified cert, because it goes some way towards contributing to edX and MIT, and mostly because there are rumours that MIT Biology are considering creating an XSeries − then have verified certs in likely courses is a good way to get a leg up.)