Like other reviewers were saying, the workload on this course was very uneven. The first week was very light (just use a pre-made program, screenshot a few things). The next 5 weeks were HEAVY. You have to watch 2 lecture videos, along with a quiz every week along with the lab projects. The quizzes themselves were actually very reasonable - far more reasonable with less "gotcha" questions compared to the tests from Joyner's classes. But combined with the labs, it was quite an unexpected workload. The lab assignments after the first one tended to be very vaguely worded, and there isn't a lot of well written documentation on the material it's on. I now hate FHIR's official documentation with a passion. The only thing that saved me was the ed Discussion forums where other students were extremely helpful, and the TAs during office hours and on the forum were very helpful as well. It's pretty much a necessity to hang out on the forums for the labs.

If you can get over the hump of the first several weeks of class (where you have the tough labs and quizzes every week that included essay questions), the workload of the second half of the class lightens up to almost nothing. The second half of class completely removes the weekly quizzes, labs, and lectures, and has you only focus on working on your class project. This workload probably depends on what mentor you get and what project you get, but for this semester, they were highly encouraging people to just choose their own projects and work individually. This is honestly so much better, because you can choose a project that you know you can handle and complete. If you toss out a bunch of project ideas that seem fun or doable to you (and are related to healthcare is some way), your mentor will most likely pick one. The mentor I got was very easygoing and helpful, and I chose a project I knew I could complete.

The lecture videos for this course were clear and easy to watch - I thought Dr. Duke was very easy to understand when he talked about the material. If you watch the lectures and take good and very detailed and searchable notes, you should be fine for the quizzes. For participation, it's kind of vague how you'd get most of your participation credit, but I managed to get the full score for it by commenting a lot and helping to answer questions on the ed Discussion forums about the lab problems. I highly recommend doing this, because your opportunities to get participation credit in the last half of the class dwindles to almost nothing after the required labs are finished and everyone is just working on their projects.

I'd recommend this class if you don't mind having a heavier workload in the beginning and want a light workload later in the semester.