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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Basic Statistics by University of Amsterdam

4.6
stars
4,501 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

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.

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!

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851 - 875 of 1,092 Reviews for Basic Statistics

By Mohammad U S S

Feb 26, 2018

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 !

By Paolo M P B

Jul 24, 2020

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.

By Bening M

Apr 20, 2020

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?'

By iina

Sep 13, 2020

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).

By Juhong P

Apr 22, 2018

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.

By Liam M

Jun 13, 2018

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!

By Gabriella C

Mar 4, 2016

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.

By dhushyanth l

Dec 5, 2016

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.

By Kyoko Y

Jan 15, 2020

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.

By Barbara V

Feb 29, 2016

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.

By Chia H L

Jun 10, 2020

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.

By Shailesh N

Jan 2, 2017

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.

By Diego M R

May 27, 2016

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.

By Cathy H

Apr 2, 2019

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.

By Connie H

Apr 25, 2020

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.

By AKSHAY M

Jun 13, 2020

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.

By Frank P

Mar 10, 2016

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.

By Dr. S N

Aug 10, 2020

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.

By Utkarsh K

Jul 27, 2021

The 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.

By Peter Z

Dec 31, 2020

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.

By James R

Jul 18, 2018

Great course to learn or review the basics of stats; it won't satisfy you if you're looking for mathematical proofs and derivations. That said, it does a surprisingly good job of teaching the statistical method without the proofs, and that may be just what many people want.

By shilpa h

Mar 9, 2020

This is a fantastic course for beginners. The course has covered all basic concepts in levels that are easily understandable. I felt that they could have touched upon chi square test as well. Also, I wouldn'd mind 1-2 extra videos per week to go in depth of some concepts.

By Sree N

Oct 9, 2019

The majority of the course is super helpful in understanding Basic Stats. The only critique is that the advice/hints given in R-Lab are extremely unhelpful most of the time. Aside from this I recommend this course to anyone wanting a basic understanding of statistics .

By Suzanne D

Aug 22, 2019

I did not want to learn R as part of this course. It added work that was not necessary as I am proficient with a different program already. I was just interested in the information on the stats themselves and the R did not add value. It should be optional for all labs.

By Swap J

Mar 19, 2016

I really enjoyed attending this course and recommended it to my colleagues and friends who want to learn basic statistics. They have tried their best to make it more intuitive with some interesting examples and make the learning somewhat fun. kudos to the entire team!