Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Statistics by Stanford University

This course covers the most popular statistical ideas (it closely follows the O'Reilly book "Practical Statistics for Data Scientists"), so the material is relevant. Unfortunately, the course is not designed well for comprehension. The instructor glosses over things very quickly, and fails to define crucial terms and concepts. For instance, he never once says "this is the formula for deriving the standard deviation," instead he only ever says "now we will standardize" and you need to know what he means. When calculating probability in the early lessons, he does not pause to help you learn how to assign A and B, nor does he stop to say which values he has assigned to A and which to B. As of May 2020, halfway into what I believe is the first iteration of the course, the Forums were not turned on so we cannot seek help from our classmates, even though about 3,000 are currently enrolled. I'm five weeks in and completely undecided about whether to continue or not; I am not learning statistics; for the most part I am just retaking the tests over and over again until I pass. Please at a minimum turn on the forums for students. But also consider re-recording the Probability section to include more instruction about how to assign variables to A and B, and to more clearly specify what the teacher considers to be A and B in the course examples. IAlso, if the profession consistently uses the phrase "standardize" to mean "calculate the standard deviation" please say that somewhere. n addition, the Week 3 Quiz includes a question not covered until the Week 4 material.

It's an Introduction to Statistics and it means it should help those who are new to statistics. But it's way far from that.

The instructor explains topics very very very very and again very summarized. While he drops mind boggling formulas on to the screen, he explains you the 1/100 of the tip of the ice berg.

You just cannot use this course for an introduction to statistics. You need a lot of books and a lot of time to get the quizzes right.

I've completed 10 modules. However I decide to stop learning statistics here although I've passed the 10 modules with high scores.

I think the learning materials of this course are valuable and the instructor, professor Guenther Walther is excellent. However, for global students, this course is awful, comparing with the other beginner level courses in Coursera, A lot of concepts in the videos are not introduced clearly, for example, what is median? How to find the median? How to distinguish dependent variables from independent variables? What is a sample? What is a category? What is replacement for a draw? When should be replacement? I think the instructor assumed every student here is a Stanford student or an American student.

To be honest, this course is not supportive to students because it doesn't open the discussion forum for students to discuss the problems coming from the materials and correct the incorrect calculation in the instruction. In addition, there is not any handout to help students to summarize what are taught in the module or give more examples. Only quizzes, but no exercises. These makes the learning here generate a lot of difficulties and failures despite there are explanations following the quizzes.

In spite of that, I will miss the voice of professor Guenther Walther. The voice sounds sincere and friendly.

I will come back when I think I can continue to learn here. Hope this course will be improved in the future.

Enjoyed the course but had repeating problems with the Coursera platform not submitting quizzes for weeks. Coursera provided no support and no communication (zero). Had to contact Stanford administration to get any action on the problem. Still Coursera did not communicate and were slow to respond to the school administration. Finally fixed two days before course deadline.

Critical bugs in the Coursera platform. Absolutely no response from Coursera to flagged bug reports. Absolutely no Coursera support. Cannot recommend.

No proper explanation of concepts, no in detail examples, no proper set of quizes,content is lagging

The lecturer is extremely dry and the course materials contain many gaps. Concepts are discussed without having been properly introduced.

I'm disappointed that this course is listed as an introduction, when the professor does not treat it as such. He glosses over important information and does not care to explain in any detail. I had to search for Conditional Probablility on youtube just to grasp the concept. The professor didn't care to explain the one example he gave us in any detail. I'll come back to this course after I've taken a real introduction to statistics. This is NOT for beginners.

Excellent content - explains complex concepts in simple words. Though i had prior knowledge of statistics and i undertook this course as part of the Foundation in Data science course, i found this excellent content.

It was not an easy course for me due to my background, but the content is really well explained. I now want to learn more about the statistics.

very good basic statistics score, explained in detail and all the basics cleared, everyone should go for it

The course is great for those who want to brush up on the foundational statistical concepts for advanced learning. If Prof. Walther offers more educational content that's relevant to me, I'd gladly take it!

The course is very informative and easy to understand. Each topic was explained clearly with examples. Hope that there will be an advanced course

V​ery good introduction to statistical concepts that help you build on your intuition.

I found that some of the content was confusing.

V​ery confusing. I'm used to seeing derivations and logical sequences of how concepts progress from one to another. This is an incredibly frustrating course with large gaps which can only be filled in if you've studied this before, in which case you wouldn't need to do this one. How is the correlation coefficient related to the linear regression formulae? Where's the algebra? Why can you use x to predict y, but not use y to predict x? Has it got something to do with covariance, whic I just read up on?? Who knows.

I know this is a condensed version of the subject, but sometimes going into more depth can help explain things so that you understand them and in turn make the subject easier.

I like the content and how the course was divided but spent most of the time looking for clearer explanation on youtube. Explanations are very vague. I wished they had more details and showed how to 'compute' instead of just showing the result. I would also advise on more quizzes and examples. In my case, It was very discouraging to look elsewhere for a fully paid course. I'd not recomend this course for a beginner with no notion of probability.

INSUFFICIENT LECTURES

It is a great course to learn the key foundamental concepts about statistics theories. I did not grasp the whole concepts at once, but by repeating the video and reading the materials I was able to understand the key concepts. Good starter for data science field study.

very good course to take , because this course was explained in detailed and also by doing the quiz of this course helpful to learn perfectly.

Excellent course... Only improvement I can suggest is to add more problems in the lectures as well as quizzes.

Solid exposure to introductory content. Prof Walther speaks clearly and the examples help in practicing!

This course will surely help kick start my career in data science. I have learned alot.

Excellent teacher. Course would benefit from some more examples.

Very good introduction to Statistics!

A wonderful course. However, I don't think it's strictly a beginner course because several concepts could be better comprehended with a pre-existing knowledge of the subject. This course makes concepts clearer and enhances understanding.