Really good and well taught.

It was a well taught course

Nice intro to stats and R.

Need more courses about R

5 for Stats and 3 for R.

The classes are good.

great course so far!!

Comprehensive Course

Excellente course!!!

Great explanation

very interesting

Great course!

very helpful

good lecture

excellent

Very Good

gracias

Great!

good

good

N/A

很好啊

V

v

Very mixed feelings about this course.

Generally speaking, the course lectures are informative and well organized. Mentors are reallly of great help, they are doing a great job, honestly: they are very active, they give good insights, they know the subject matter.

But in the course lectures, there are occasions where concepts are used which were not formally introduced before their actual use.

One example: in the lectures on probability, the first "slide" in the lecture talks about random processes, outcomes of random process,... On the next slide, the notion of probability of an event is introduced, but the very notion of "event" was never introduced. It is introduced in the accompanying book, but if it is the case that the book chapters should be read PRIOR to watching the course videos, that fact should be made clear.

Further in the course on probability, some words are used "interchangeably" without the context making it clear why they can be used interchangeably. For instance, on some occasions, the concept of independent events is used, but then, later on, the discussion talks of independent processes. Which is which??? Is there a difference? If so, what is it? When do I need to use independent events as opposed to independent processes?

The graded assignments are of varying quality. The most disturbing thing about them is that, on some occasions, concepts are used in the quiz questions (either directly in the questions and answer choices, or indirectly in the "correction" for the quiz after you have submitted it) that were never touched upon in the course.

I have had two occasions of concepts not introduced in the course but used in the graded assignments.

The first occurrence of a gap between course content and quiz questions was on a quiz question about inference. I failed the question, and understood why I failed based on the course content litterally minutes after failing the question (and one mentor actually rightly corrected me). But the question "correction" (the explanation text you receive after submitting, as justification for what the correct answer is) referred to the concept of "two-sided hypothesis test". Where did THAT come from?? I checked and rechecked the course videos, no mention at all of it. I checked the accompanying book, and the first mention of two-sided hypothesis test is way way way further in the book, in a chapter that is entirely focusing on inference.

The second occurrence was in week 4. The course lectures cover two distributions: normal and binomial. The recommended reading in the book also focus on these two distributions (the recommended reading actually skips the section on geometric distribution, if I remember well). But in one of the quiz question, there was one of the possible answers referring to the geometric distribution. If it is the case that we are supposed to know and understand about geometric distributions, then the course content should cover the subject. Or at the very least, the course lecture should mention clearly that learners are advised to read about it in the accompanying book.

The guidelines for the project assignment (week 5) are not all that clear as to what is expected from the learners. Sure, there are instructions on where to find the info, what structure should be followed,... There is also a very nice "example" project (designed by one of the mentors), which provides a lot of useful info (how to filter missing values from variables,...).

But there is no real hint as to the depth of analysis we are expected to complete. This is definitely a source of confusion, not only for me, but also for a few other learners, from what I gathered in the discussion forums. The result is that the projects you get to review are of very disparate levels. Some end up in calculating one figure per research question, without any attempt at deriving trends or patterns, others do not include any plots at all,... The thing is that the peer review criteria do not really provide a good basis to ensure that learners did indeed assimilate the course contents. Most of the questions in the peer review assignment have a lot more to do with following a canvas and not so much with the course substance itself.

For instance, some of the peer review criteria have to do with the narratives for computed statistics and plots. The criteria are: "Is each plot/R outout followed by a narrative", "Does the narrative correctly interpret the plots, or statistics", "Does the narrative address the research question". But when the research question is a question of the type "What it the IQR for income per state", for instance, the narrative can be very short: "IQR per state shows that the state with higher variability of income is...". So, the narrative meets the 3 evaluation criteria: there is a narrative, it does address the research question, and it does correctly interpret the statistics. But it is not particularly useful.

I do understand that Internet-based peer review is challenging, and that you have to settle for "neutral" criteria that are easy to assess by learners. But the peer review grading "grid" as it currently stands is not "that" helpful in assessing whether the course contents has been assimilated.

To conclude, when I took the course, my initial plan was to follow the entire specialization. But after having completed the first course of the specialization, I have radically changed my mind, and will look for alternatives "elsewhere" to get the knowledge/skillset that I am after.