A short statistics course

For years, I have wanted to see a statistics course that is not a math class. So I made one myself. The title of the course is "How to do statistics without really doing statistics?". It's on a new online learning platform called Three Nights and Done. There are three hours worth of materials divided into three or four chunks each hour.

Here is the link.

I'd love to hear some feedback. Please leave a comment here.

 

PS. Errata. I have requested these be fixed. But until that time, please note:

Night 2 - Part 3: at the start of the discussion of the Monty Hall problem (roughly 6:56), there is a duplicated segment which you will hear again later in the same recording. This can be very confusing to those who don't know what the Monty Hall problem is. You should skip from 6:56 to 8:53 (redundant), then the flow is maintained.

Night 3 - Part 1: the introductory comments to Night 3 went missing, and will be added back. Here is the transcript: Class 3 is based on my new book Numbersense. The premise of the book is that the world of Big Data is very confusing, and filled with claims and counterclaims. A key skill is how to analyze and interpret other people's data analyses. The book gets at different aspects of Numbersense. In Class 3, I focus on two fundamental ones: knowing how data is collected, and knowing how data is processed. These two sound simple; they are anything but. Data collection and processing is a very messy world, and very arbitrary as well. However, these are two really important things to know. If you come across a study that does not disclose details of how data was collected and processed, you should be highly skeptical about the results.

Night 3 - Part 3: start listening at 12:53. the segment before 12:53 is an exact copy of the end of Part 2.

 

Comments

[B_dimitri]

First of all - this is a great idea. Statistics course or tutorial that doesn't look like a math textbook full of formulae sounds fantastic. I only had a quick look, but the choice of content looks great too - real life examples and practical applications. Thank you for putting it together and offering it for free.
But why did you choose the video format for it? As far as I could see, there was nothing animated or moving there, the same slide was shown for many minutes while you narrated the content. I personally found the narration pace too slow, but someone might find it to be just right.
I would prefer reading it at my own pace while referring to slides/images embedded through the text.
Also, the sound is far from studio quality - it has distracting undesirable sound effects and some background noise.
I think this would have been better as a series of blog posts or similar, and for quizzes after each section you could use some web widgets or just simple bullet lists with answers in next section.

[Kaiser]

B_dimitri: Thanks for the note. The platform specifies a particular video recording software, and user feedback will definitely influence its future development.
As for my own part in this, I have to say I learned a lot from developing this course. One thing I definitely learned is I speak too slowly. You may notice that in Days 2 and 3, I tried to speed up. Day 1 was my first ever recording. I may re-do it if enough people find it unacceptable.
I also notice the static slide problem. I could not figure out how to solve this because you can animate a sound bite, but not a full hour-long lecture. One thought is more slides with more pictures, and fewer words per slide. I was wondering how people can listen to business books as audio books.
The other thing that surprised me was how much time it took to create such a course. All my slides have to be buttoned up before I could even record one word.

[Andy Holaday]

Hi Kaiser, I just listened to the 1st night in full. Overall, this is a great job, and I appreciate what you have done. The content is great and I like the way you talk through and elaborate the slides and examples.
The pace was a little slow for me, but possibly that is because I have already read "Numbers Rule Your World". My only real criticisms are the slide show renders horribly on the video, and it doesn't seem possible to get feedback on the quizzes.
Thanks for putting this together!

[Kaiser]

Andy: Thanks for the encouraging words. I will send the feedback to the site operators, regarding the software. What do you mean by feedback on quizzes?

[zbicyclist]

I've listened to lecture 1. The content is fine, but as you've noted yourself the narration is too slow (and a bit flat: Could you get Beyonce to record it? ;) ) On some smartphones you can speed up the audio playback; if that was possible on this website that would be a simple way to handle this.

It might be good to point out some of the limitations of credit modeling -- there can be a fair bit of GIGO if the incoming data are not accurate, and the credit reporting agencies don't have a huge incentive for accuracy.

[Kaiser]

zbicyclist: Thanks for the feedback. What I'm confused about (primarily because I am not an audio book person) is whether it is possible to learn anything from a recording in which the narrator speaks fast. Do you end up rewinding frequently?

For those who are wondering, GIGO = Garbage In Garbage Out. On the accuracy issue, I take a relative view, which is to say the alternative of manual scoring is not better as it relies on the same flawed data. From an absolute view, you're right that there are definitely mistakes.