I am thinking about taking this course. You need to understand energy, and how it can exist in one place or another, how it can be transported from here to there, and can be stored for later use. You need to know how to deal with a conserved quantity like energy mathematically, and to appreciate that if energy decreases in one region, it must increase elsewhere. All physical systems obey the laws of thermodynamics. The challenge is to express these laws in simple but general forms so that their significance in, for example, a biological system gives insight.
Most scientists recognize that information can be exchanged for entropy and vice versa.
The reason is that in typical physical situations the number of bits of entropy is far larger than the number of bits of information that even the largest information processing systems can deal with. In other words, the scales involved are vastly different. This is because there are a large number of atoms in physical systems. For two reasons. First, the underlying principles are the same so learning about information in one system can help the understanding of another system.