As an instructor on Coursera, you will build a course which tens to hundreds of thousands of students will take, and which will bring together a truly amazing diversity of people from true beginners to your professional colleagues. No small task!

After you have completed construction of your Course Description Page where students will sign up for your course, you should make time to explore the tools available to construct the course itself, which you will be building right here. Here are the main resources you can use to familiarize yourself with the platform:

1. Read the Launching Your Course Session section in our support documentation and begin early. Many instructors assume that creating video lectures is the most important part of constructing their course and are late to discover the wide functionality available for creating assessments, structuring course pages, and communicating with their class, and thus wind up rushing small but important tasks, like creating and articulating a clear grading policy, which are critical to the success of a course.


2. Explore the Coursera Partners' Portal. The Portal contains examples of the best and most innovative practices from across Coursera and highlights important functionality you can use in your lectures, peer assessments, programming assignments, and in-video or standard quizzes. It is also home to discussion forums where you can ask questions and gain insight from other instructors, teaching assistants, and administrators across our courses and partner institutions.

Lastly, this site itself is an important resource for learning to use the platform. Use the navigation bar at the top to access the admin interface. You can always click on the name of your course (just below the admin navigation bar) to get back to the student view.

Start early, and have fun! It's time to make a very big impact.

- The Coursera team

Wed 13 Aug 2014 7:47 PM CEST

Hi--As of around noon EDT, softberry.com is up and running. I will keep monitoring and if the site goes down again, I will post results so that people may finish the week 4 assignment.

That was a frustrating and ill-timed crash (or maintenance or whatever that was).

-Bob Lessick

Tue 8 Jul 2014 5:59 AM CEST

Hello and welcome to Bioinformatics: Life Sciences on Your Computer!

Let's get started. There are several video lectures available, and there are also reading materials in PDF format that supplement the lectures. Most videos will be 10-15 minutes in length.

The best way to learn bioinformatics is to do it. On the left menu, you should see a link that reads Readings/Practice. This is where you will find the supplemental readings (also attached to videos) and the practice problems. Solutions are provided at the end of the problems.

Each week will have one quiz and one assignment. I plan for both to be good learning exercises as opposed to sources of high stress.

I hope to have an active discussion forum where you can ask questions and collaborate on problems. I will try to answer as much as possible so please don;t be shy about asking questions or sharing ideas!

Let's have a fabulous early summer!
-Bob Lessick

Wed 28 May 2014 5:54 PM CEST