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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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826 - 850 of 1,065 Reviews for Basic Statistics

By Gustavo H P T

Mar 20, 2017

I had a really great time with this course. A lot of work went into it, from the presentation to the content. Really well done. It was quite challenging. I felt that the last module (7) introduced some very difficult concepts which, even after checking other sources, I couldn't understand fully. Some questions from the exam in that module were substantially different from the ones in the lectures. I would give 4.5 stars if I could.

By Charlotte

Dec 19, 2016

I liked the content of the course very much; the videos were all very clear, with nice examples & visualisations of those examples. However, the R labs included in this course were not very challenging; by following a list of steps you can complete them easily without learning much from them. Additionally, the R labs sometimes would not accept an answer as correct when it was a slightly different solution to the same problem.

By Roberto Z

Jul 22, 2017

This is a good course for the videos (some mistakes there, beware) and material provided, but it is just ok as the quality of the tests. Sometime just felt like a monkey typing again the same ops over and over. The R lab is sometimes really frustrating as questions are not clear enough. I feel a good table of Z and T scores for the most used confidence and significance levels would be a good addition to the course material.

By Addler M

May 9, 2017

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.

By Kyle P R

Dec 5, 2019

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!

By Jenna H

May 8, 2018

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!

By Kiarash B

Feb 14, 2021

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.

By Durbar S

Oct 21, 2018

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.

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.