I'm interested in furthering my statistics knowledge (I just finished my masters in biostatistics but obviously even with a masters I've only just scratched the surfact of the world of stats).
I am thinking about possibly trying to do some online learning and was wondering if anybody has ever used statistics.com. If so, would you recommend their courses?
Is there a website that anybody would recommend? I'd for sure like to start learning R as well as more advanced stats methods (time series, bootstrapping....) and would greatly appreciate if someone could recommend any website that I could take courses.
Someone had previously posted this https://www.coursera.org/#courses which I was going to check out the stats course that uses R, so let me know if you sign-up and have questions.
I would probably sway away from courses that cost money, this day and age you can get a pretty good education from the web and hands_on practice, post grad school.
Congrats on your degree! I took one course in meta analysis from statistics.com, about 3 years ago. You seem to be really gung ho about taking a class; any reason why you wouldn't just want to read books on your own and self-study?
My opinion of statistics.com
It was a good chance to get into the subject, statistics.com seems to get decent instructors. I'm glad it exists, because I can't keep up the motivation to work through a book by myself. The class is quick though (only 5 weeks), and I think they should be longer so you can get more into the subject, and discuss more details. Don't get me wrong, we covered everything I needed for meta analysis, but a couple more weeks to go through details and get experience would maybe have really helped the course. One big key to being learned is communicating with colleagues, and we never got a chance to know people in those 5 weeks.
One problem with online courses (I took mine 3 years ago, maybe they've improved this) is that anyone can take them. So you had some guys who couldn't get the software to run (understandable), and some other guys who were asking questions like how to calculate odds ratios from the betas (should be known before you go into this course, at least that's how I felt/hoped). It's people at different levels, and the instructor, since (s)he treats all students equally, spends a lot of time answering questions from 15 different people. Some people asked really good questions, so that's why I liked the statistics.com course.
The contact with instructor is done on an entry level "message board". In my course, a class meeting time was never set up where everyone had to be on-line (as in a chat) at the same time. This is a drawback, I would say.
I think the course costs $600? It's not a rip off, you do learn some things, but I'd be more comfortable taking another course if it was down to $300. My only problems with statistics.com are the same problems I'd have with any online courses. We can all download lectures from MIT, but that's not the same as getting an MIT education because you're not discussing problems with MIT students.
If you want to learn R
You could get started on learning R right here, I think? Just start up a thread, like some others have done, but tell them that you'd really like to discuss the finer points of the language. You can start with how to import an Excel file into R, then how you do some data manipulation (setting values to missing, etc). This is not as structured as a course, but I don't know what you want. Just throwing it out that it is possible.
Thanks! I'm more just curious if anyone has taken any type of online course and if they would recommend it. I'm likely going to just buy a few books on R and sort of teach myself but if someone had a great experience with an online course than I would consider that route as well.
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