Explore Statistics with R

Explore statistics with R is a 5-week introductory level course offered by the Karolinska Instetutet through the edX platform, covering the basics of R, statistics and using R for statistical analysis. The course covers 3 main topic areas in 4 weeks--R basics, getting and manipulating data in R and statistical tests in R. The 5th week consists of a final graded assignment where you follow along with research project conducted in R. Each week consists of a few short lecture videos followed by a series of graded quiz questions. The class awards a certificate if you achieve a total score at last 60% on the quizzes and the final graded assignment.

Explore stats in R offers some quality content, but it is too short constitute a complete intro to R or stats. The professor speaks clearly, explains concepts well and seems genuinely excited to be teaching the course. I noticed he seemed active on the course's discussion boards, which is nice to see. The quizzes were too few and a bit too easy: they generally tested conceptual knowledge and did not require the student to do much in R besides copy, paste and run code. As a course focused on statistical operations, it didn't teach basic programming concepts in R like control flow and functions. This course could benefit from having a bit more content each week and beefing up the homework exercises to force students to do a little bit more in R on their own. Extending the course by a couple of weeks would also give the professor time to cover some neglected topics like programming basics in R and more on data visualization. With expanded content this could be a great course, so hopefully they'll make some tweaks and additions and offer it again.

I give this course 3.5 out of 5 stars: Good.

This course, offered by the Karolinska Institute, is a gentle introduction to the R language. I have to admit that I only watched a few of the videos. These are very high quality compared to the Johns Hopkins Data Science courses, but this course suffers from the same issues as many of the other introductory R courses out there, namely, that there is very little true challenge in these courses and that most of the exercises are simply copying code and interpreting the output. Despite the criticisms of R Programming and the other JHU courses, those courses do force students to learn to write code in order to solve the problems. I finished this course with a 92% in a bit over 2 hours of total work, and I imagine anyone who has any experience with R could do likewise. A few of the questions were a bit tricky (but didn't require any programming), and they only give you two attempts, so it might still be difficult to get 100% in the course without careful study, but passing this one (pass line 56%) should be no problem.

Overall, two stars. This might be useful as a gentle introduction to the R language, but you won't learn to code well by taking this course.