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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Basic Statistics by University of Amsterdam

4.6
stars
4,363 ratings

About the Course

Understanding statistics is essential to understand research in the social and behavioral sciences. In this course you will learn the basics of statistics; not just how to calculate them, but also how to evaluate them. This course will also prepare you for the next course in the specialization - the course Inferential Statistics. In the first part of the course we will discuss methods of descriptive statistics. You will learn what cases and variables are and how you can compute measures of central tendency (mean, median and mode) and dispersion (standard deviation and variance). Next, we discuss how to assess relationships between variables, and we introduce the concepts correlation and regression. The second part of the course is concerned with the basics of probability: calculating probabilities, probability distributions and sampling distributions. You need to know about these things in order to understand how inferential statistics work. The third part of the course consists of an introduction to methods of inferential statistics - methods that help us decide whether the patterns we see in our data are strong enough to draw conclusions about the underlying population we are interested in. We will discuss confidence intervals and significance tests. You will not only learn about all these statistical concepts, you will also be trained to calculate and generate these statistics yourself using freely available statistical software....

Top reviews

AV

Jun 27, 2022

Instructors have provided concise explanations of the concepts. There are many examples considered that make statistics easier to understand! Also, the illustrations are fancy. I enjoyed every video!

PG

Apr 20, 2016

This is a nice course...thanks for providing such a great content from University of Amserdam.

Please allow us to complete the course as I have to wait till the session starts for week 2 lessions.

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1001 - 1025 of 1,065 Reviews for Basic Statistics

By Curt E

Mar 14, 2017

The course has fun illustrations and a high quality of production, but the lessons themselves don't dive very deep. Ideas are introduced but not considered in depth. One such example is variance. We get the equations but not much insight into what it is a measure of and it's value. Additionally, and this might just be me, but the experiments used to illustrate examples at times are difficult to understand.

By John R

Apr 19, 2020

The presentation of the course is exceptionally good and quite engaging.

The way that the material is presented is very dense and a lot of the content of the course is buried in a deluge of definitions. I think The course would benefit from a slower pace and a slower introduction to the main concepts.

I did not make it until the end but will try further offerings from this University

By David P S

May 6, 2020

Nowhere near as basic as I needed. It's all fine until you are expected to be a computer programmer, with a complete grasp of how to use R. I was so lost I did another stats course to try to get this one done, but the programming stuff was completely bewildering, so i gave up without success.

Perhaps a clearer description of the requirements of the course would help.

By Christelle C

Apr 6, 2017

I am new to statistics and found most of the lessons difficult to understand, although I did pass the course and had taken the first two courses of the specialization before. More exercises would help. Also I do not plan on using R in the future so this part of the course was not very relevant to me, but it was not the hardest.

By Gabriel O M

Sep 10, 2018

Some lectures were very good but others were extremely bad. Especially those given by the second professor were very confusing and not very well planned. One video even finished in the middle of a sentence. The exercises in R were also sometimes very badly designed. It was frustrating to try and finish them.

By Ryan J

Nov 11, 2020

Many of the explanations did not help for answering test questions. The R segment was nearly impossible because there was little explanation. The test questions did not always reflect how to use statistics but rather dealt with minutiae about details. Other than these aspects, the class was very useful.

By Monica

Aug 22, 2020

A great introduction to stats. However, the course could be improved. Learning to use R takes way more time than Coursera declared. A great disappointment but also a relief is that in the syllabus it says you can only take the final test once a month but you actually have 2 attempts every 24 hours.

By Maxwell, L

May 22, 2020

It would be great if it was not assumes that we exactly knew how they came up with the numbers when setting up the equations. It would also be nice if the equations and material covered matched the material in the final exam. I did learn a lot but I would have liked to have learne

By Niharika S

Mar 12, 2022

It was difficult to follow the module of one of the teachers. This topic is helpful only and only if you have already done some study of basic statistics and then have come to this module for further understanding of it. It is difficult for a beginner to understand the course.

By Vítor F F

Jul 30, 2020

The lectures are great, but ther questions in the test didn't feel exaplained enough. I hard a hrd time not getting stressed in the R lab tests too: felt like it assumed you perfectly learned the functions and could easily reach the result. Not a course for beginers.

By Dr. m K K

Aug 9, 2020

Very challenging, maybe a bit too much for someone who needs basic knowledge, but will work with an statistician in his/her projects later on. The necessary times (especially for the final exam) are actually much longer, than indicated!

By Anvime

Jan 8, 2016

I think the notes given after the lectures should contain the formula the students need. Also the quizes should show the correct answers once you completed them, if not you cant figure out why the questions are wrong.

By Peter W

Jul 3, 2020

The quality of the teaching was uneven. Good effort to make difficult topics understandable in places, but poor in others. I needed to supplement with other materials in order to grasp some of the concepts.

By Bidhan D

Jun 21, 2020

Although it is hard to understand week three and four. But if anyone to understand the basic knowledge regarding statistics, i think this course will be helpful to any new learner from any background.

By Sarah C

Nov 29, 2021

If you are not familiar with R, this course may take you a long time. Having no background in coding and no course materials to help- this course was painful. A little guidance would go a long way.

By Roberta B

Jul 25, 2022

This course in itself is not bad but it has a range of issues with weird phrasing, grammatical mistakes and sometimes test questions were related to topics that were only explained in later weeks.

By Mahamadshabir M

Jan 1, 2021

It has been really great experience studying on Such Platform. Has got lots new things to learn. Requesting to provide reading manuals/write ups. Although lectures were provided in writing.

By Nikita F

Sep 13, 2017

Unfortunately I didn't like this course – the basic things are explained in great details (which is not always necessary), but more complicated terms are not covered in the way they should.

By Martin R

May 2, 2023

The first two weeks were really good, weeks 3 and 4 were a complete disaster. Videos have incorrect information that have never been corrected. I wouldn't recommend this course to anyone.

By SRINIVAS R

Apr 2, 2016

some of the videos were outstanding and easy to understand. Need more handholding for understanding of concepts and review/explanation of the quiz results will reinforce learning further.

By Steph B

Dec 27, 2020

Some info was presented really quickly and the course notes didn't help. Very shallow explanation. Having a recommended textbook that go into more depth would have been great

By tressie p

Jan 4, 2020

I was expecting to learn basic statistic before diving into the programming. I did not take this class to get familiar with R programming. And it slow me down.

By Christina P

Oct 26, 2017

It was a really nice and informative course. As a statistics rookie, I can say with confidence that I now know the basics of Statistics! Thank you very much!

By Manish G

Jan 25, 2022

Couse name should mention something like Basic statistics with 'R since it cover pretty good amoing of R language

By LADDEN D N U

Oct 11, 2020

VERY INFORMATIVE COURSE, YET I AM NOT THAT FAN OF THE rLAB BECAUSE OF THEIR INSTRUCTIONS THAT ARE HARD TO GET.