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A comment on Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?.

Re:Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? by neovive on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @11:37AM (#16745685)
Over the past few years, I've watched a few courses on Udacity, Coursera and EdX. I prefer taking ad-hoc courses to fill knowledge gaps (statistics, AI, programming, math, etc.), so I can't give a full review of the complete Nanodegrees, Certificates, XSeries, etc. I usually watch the lessons as needed without completing the entire course; mixing and matching MOOC courses with video learning sites (e.g. Datacamp, Youtube channels, Khan Academy, Egghead, etc.)

If I had to pick a MOOC platform, I prefer Udacity's more hands-on approach, but enjoy courses on EdX and Coursera. The quality of all three MOOC platforms is excellent. It's an amazing time for autodidacts!

If you're starting from scratch, without any background knowledge, the certificate programs with access to mentors are a great place to start. The curriculum is designed by industry professionals and/or experienced professors. This saves you time, keeps you focused and offers a place to get help when needed.

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? by jitix on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @11:43AM (#16745756)
Do you have any recommendations on statistics for beginners?
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Re:Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? by neovive on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @11:59AM (#16745954)
Udacity has two free introductory statistics courses that they recommend prior to starting their AI nanodegree program:

Intro to Descriptive Statistics [https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-descriptive-statisti...]

Intro to Inferential Statistics [https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-inferential-statisti...]

Khan Academy also has very in-depth coverage of statistics, starting from the basics. https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? by ycombinator_usr on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @01:32PM (#16747020)
if you want to focus on Statistical Learning, I can recommend Introduction to Statistical Learning Using R[1] by Prof. Hastie and Tibshirani.

[1]: https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/HumanitiesSciences/Sta...

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? by harry8 on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @08:42PM (#16750844)
I found the lectures entertaining and the exercises of a much lower quality. Not enough of them, shallow and ambiguously worded.

I got something like 90% on the edx MITx probability course and was barely getting 50% for the above mentioned Stanford stat learning course for the 5 weeks of it I completed. I mention the MIT course, (which I highly recommend fwiw) only to support my view that I don't think my experience is aptitude or workload related. But as ever YMMV.

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? by bbarn on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @08:33PM (#16750797)
Not a MOOC, but I loved this: http://www.statsoft.com/Textbook/Basic-Statistics/button/1
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