Review of the course Statistics One
Back to the courseReview: Statistics One
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are all the rage these days, so I decided to try one out of curiosity. My choice was Coursera’s Statistics One, a six week course taught by Andrew Conway, a psychology professor from Princeton University. Here’s a short review of the first version of the course from fall 2012.
My background: As a computer scientist I’ve had lots of maths exposure at university, including statistics and probability theory. But that was a long time ago and my knowledge has become quite rusty due to lack of practice. I generally enjoy learning new stuff, but usually I stay within my comfort zone, which is distributed systems and software engineering.
Content: Statistics One was very much unlike the mathematical statistics treatment I was used to. It was announced as a course suitable for everyone and it covered much of the basics, but there were parts that were mostly relevant to students from the social sciences. While it’s interesting to see how psychologists set up their experiments (my little sister is a psychologist), I would have preferred a bit more mathematical depth and references to literature or online resources. This would have helped to gain a deeper understanding or to get explanations from a different angle, especially since the suggested text book didn’t cover the entire course. Anyway, all in all this was by far the easiest maths related course I’ve ever had.
... read full post
Cancel and back to the course