Learner Reviews & Feedback for Basic Statistics by University of Amsterdam

Lectures and quizzes were great. The main part of the course was fun and informative.

Labs were awful. They did not teach or incorporate R well, they were inconsistent with the way answers should be provided, and instructions were very often unclear or missing information so that the answers could not be obtained without hitting solution or googling r things that had not been brought up before.

Overall a very good course; excellent, easy to understand explanations and engaging instruction. However, there are a couple of places where the course needs a correction, and I am deducting a star because it has been up for literally YEARS, and no corrections have ever been made. If they would actually correct the few course errors, it would be an absolutely perfect course. Cheers!

Perfect for gaining a general/ beginner knowledge, but still in-depth and good quality. As a complete novice with no natural flare for maths it did take me a lot longer than the predicted times, and I did feel like you had to research further or work around what was given, in order to answer some questions in the exams. Overall, really helpful to get the basics of statistics!

Thanks for preparing this course. All materials can be useful for anyone who wants to do statistical analysis in any fields of expertise. However, I think focusing more on practical statistics can be an insightful idea for teaching statistics since it would make more sense for all students to use these concepts and knowledge to solve scientific problems.

covers a lot of topics in a very simple manner. liked the examples taken in the course and how the important points in hypothesis testing are stressed.

the course can be improved by maybe making it a little bit more mathematical.. giving some proofs(which if the course coordinator thinks can be done in the time limits) to the formulas used in the course.

I really like the way they teach. Being a newbie to Statistics, I feel this is the right course I have chosen to start my journey of statistics. The mentors teach in a way which is easy to understand. I did not give it a full 5 star due to the inactive discussion forum. I think this would be a nice place to talk more about statistics. Cheers !

This course explained the basic concepts of statistics quite well though the course was pretty challenging. Weeks 3 onward really discouraged me and I had to put if off at times. The R assignments were helpful but I don't quite see it's weight here. Overall, this course would be good for those interested in learning the basics of statistics.

I enjoyed it and I found it useful. I started this course because I wanted to learn how to use R and it turned out that I learned a lot as well on the theoretical level. Examples made things easier to grasp. One thing, I felt that some terminology was not clearly explained and there were times that I was just confused like, 'What's that?'

Overall, an interesting, feet-on-the-ground kind of course I can warmly recommend as a first step into statistics.

Rating of "only" 4/5 since there were some confusing mistakes in the lecture videos + not all of the quiz question calculations were practised beforehand during the lectures (=I was tested on skills I hadn't practised).

I don't have any background of statistics. To me, it is really helpful to understand the basic. Some part of lecture is little bit difficult to understand and i think it needs more time for self study to catch up all the lectures and practice. My most favorite part of the course is that I was able to practice basic R programing.

Very engaging and a good level of difficulty. However, the lessons from Emiel were hard to follow because the pace was slow and his voice was soothing me to sleep! Also it would have helped so much to have the exam answers explained at the end once completed because I have no idea where I went wrong on some of the questions!

El curso es muy buena calidad académica los temas son fáciles de comprender sin embargo también debió haber vídeos sobre la programación con R para poder tener un poco mas claro estos ejercicios, ademas no debieron cambiar de profesor, ya el el maestro que imparcial los temas intermedios lo hacia de una manera muy compleja.

The course is quite informative and educative for a non-statistical person like me. The instructors were explaining complex concepts in a very simpler manner. Except that the use of data camp for R could have been replaced with the exercises done on R (offline) and submitted through the quiz. The quizzes were really good.

The explanations in the videos were easy to understand and concise.

I think it would be beneficial to add more in-depth descriptions of the answers you got correct on the quizzes. I might've gotten something correct by 1) doing it right or 2) guessing, and it would be a learning opportunity for those who simply got lucky.

Overall, a great course that provides the basics of statistics in a thorough and intuitive way, plus a taste and feel of the software R. Of special note are the amazing visualizations in the presentations! There are some typoes and errors in the course material though, which is a shame, as everything else is excellent.

I appreciate that the course has been taught in a simple and fun way. I enjoyed going through the lessons. But there are still many gaps in my understanding as I had little prior knowledge in Statistics. It will be very helpful if more exercises, worked solutions and articles for reading can be provided.

The course was great! It was quite dense and took a lot of time especially the R Lab sessions. Mr Loon may like to use more interesting ways for communication. Also the transcripts provided do not contain equations/ formulas which becomes a problem. Integrating slides into transcripts would be helpful.

I really liked the course, it was relatively easy to understand and enjoyable, and specially the lessons taught by Matthijs, he was just amazing at making it all very understandable and enjoyable. And overall, I just really feel some exercises along the way for each topic would have been of great help.

This course is mostly great! The vast majority of the materials were at a very high quality and very useful. The quality dropped in a couple of the weeks. It would be great if there was more of a moderator/course designer presence in the forums. It feels like learner questions often went unanswered.

Week 3 was particularly badly explained. The pace was too fast, examples were not lively, formulas were read with little inference or explanation. Apart from Week 3 the rest range from comfortable to nicely challenging. Enjoyed the illustrations particularly, thanks for making statistics enjoyable.

This was my first online course.Most of the basic statistics topics are covered in this course.I gain lot of knowledge from this course. The instructor were quite friendly. Finally I gain certificate after 8 weeks.

So those who to start statistics course this is the best for beginner.

Despite some error in the quizzes I learned quite a lot by taking this online course. Apparently the course organisers are overwhelmed by its success, since they react (too) slowly to comments made by students in the discussion fora. At least, errors should be tackled immediately.

Content and presentation is okay, the course is accompanied with lots of illustrations that is also good. But the problem is being a statistics, the course should have been taught using STYLUS (for eg: Machine Learning by Prof. Andrew) to reach the audience in more effective way.

T​he course was absolutely wonderful! However please work on the Probability sections - Emil van Loon actually complicates the topics way more than they are and doesn't explain his mathematical reasoning or thinking well. It was near impossible to follow what he was teaching.

Overall well done. The clarity of some exam questions could be better. There are lots of typos in the lab-exams. On the formula sheet the formula for computing the regression intercept is a = ybar - b(xbar) making b appear to be a function. The parentheses should be removed.