Very interesting course

its very helpful course

few clear explanations

A lot of useful theory

very good course

Excellent course!

Extremely helpful

Excellent Course

Good course!

Very useful

Good course

Very useful

its useful

Excelent!

Awesome!!

too hard

tough!!

Love it

good

Good

Go

I feel that the course title is inaccurate as it is more about statistical concepts and their application as opposed to learning analytics using excel. This point has been raised by several past students.

Having said that, I learned a great many news concepts which I can apply in my professional field. I would suggest that having the students make their own excel models would both give them experience in working with excel and also make it much easier for them to arrive at answers to quiz questions. I spent more time trying to navigate the large excel spreadsheet prepared by another person and to learn how to use them with no roadmap, that it took to arrive at answers to the quiz questions.

I also found it hard to follow the shift from on topic or video to the next and had to go over these several times. I felt there was no smooth flow of concepts and sometimes a concept was introduced with no direct relevance to preceding ones. i.e. a disjointed flow of information/presentation. Its decades since I was last in a class setting so maybe things have changed with online classes.

Overall a tough course to go through but given the complexity of some concepts to newbies and the potential this has to open the world of ML, AI and Big Data to many people I would still rate it a 3.

The course information is great, and my expectation was that the main focus will be on learning how to manipulate data with excel, Tableau, and SQL. The Mastering Data Analysis in Excel course part fully revolves around the Binary Classification concept and a student can't pass the quizzes without knowing and understanding it in entirety. Maybe the course title should have been more specific, such as "Mastering Statistical and Binary Classification Data via Excel Analysis". In order to avoid having students drop out before getting to the topics that made them sign up for the full course in the first place, maybe there should be a more generic emphasis on the Binary Classification topic and not focus on it as a career goal.

Also, just a note: if former Duke students who work at Argus, Google, or other companies happen to use Binary classification as part of their jobs that does not mean that every other job involves the same tasks and requirements.

In general, the course is fairly rewarding for someone like me who is coming from Engineering, and doesn't major in Business / Analytics.

What I liked: Assessments (Practice Quiz, Quizzes, Final Project) are very much rewarding in a sense that by the end of the assessments, you gain a better understanding on how the topics and concepts taught in the lectures could be applied in a practical sense in the world.

What I disliked:

1. The title of the course is pretty misleading. I signed up hoping to learn more about the technical side of Excel, the analysis parts, but here it seems that the emphasis are more on the relatively abstract analytical concepts, while Excel is merely a tool in the big picture.

2. It gets very frustrating and demotivating when the topics taught are not well-structured. There should be a video in the beginning to show the big picture, and a video at the end to sum up the main concepts and how they relate to each other.

Though at the start of the program indicates no prerequisite I would suggest that you be familiar with Algebra and Stats. Most videos are of Dr. Egger writing out algebraic equations and discussing them, the excel component of Mastering data in excel come via pre-made calculators as attachments that you for the most part need to figure out on your own.

If you do not have a good comfort level with stats then you will require more time to spend on understanding the spreadsheet and it’s use.

It would be fantastic if Dr Egger could go through the spreadsheets as a part of the video and show a couple examples, hopefully revisions down the road !

It was challenging but not impossible, and if you do not challenge yourself how much are you really learning?

Best of luck!