THE ANALYTICS EDGE

Things have changed yet again.

On Monday, I decided to stop taking the R Programming course on Coursera, at least for the time being.

Don’t worry, I’m not giving up on Data Science! I’m just going to start new coursework elsewhere.

What brought about this decision?

In all honesty, I do not feel that the class is taught very well, especially for beginners to R. I completed the first two weeks, with the exception of the programming assignment. So far, besides the Statistics with Interactive R Learning (SWIRL) console, the entire class consists of simple slides that the instructor reads aloud.

Technically, I could teach the course if that’s all it involves.

The concepts are only briefly spoken about in a slideshow of bullet points, with very few actual examples of how to apply the functions and code, and no practical demonstrations. There is also a HUGE disconnection between what is taught in the class and the requirements for the assignments.

For someone with knowledge of R, I’m sure the assignments aren’t all that difficult. However, for a beginner, they are nearly impossible without spending many hours searching online for coding answers. It was Monday, after spending days on part one of my programming assignment, that I finally read reviews and forums, where a ton of other students were having the same issues.

To an experienced programmer or software engineer, I’m sure I sound like an idiot for not being able to write a relatively simple function for a data set. And believe me, I was feeling like one.

I was questioning my goals. If I can’t complete my first programming assignment, what possible chance would I have to become a data scientist?

I found the final function for my project online, and I had hoped I could “reverse engineer” the results in the same way I learned HTML. Sadly, R is much more complex than HTML, at least for me. I was able to understand a lot of HTML code by looking at completed templates and seeing how it translated to a webpage, but I still couldn’t quite grasp how one step led to another in R.

My hope was restored while reading other people’s frustrations. I could probably learn a lot more with a text book than I could watching a slideshow being read aloud. Fortunately, there are many other courses for beginners that I can take. And I’m especially thankful that I didn’t pay for the class!

I think I have been spoiled by Khan Academy. All of the math classes I have taken are interactive video lectures. I know not all Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs (basically, online free classes)) are going to be taught the same way, but I secretly hoped they would be.

All of that said, I have decided to begin The Analytics Edge from edX. From what I read, it can be challenging and time consuming, but I’m okay with that if the class is taught well.

I enjoy a good challenge, as long as it isn’t: “This is how to assign a vector to a variable and these are some functions that are useful, now write a full function to analyze this set of data with functions we never taught you and are a complete stretch for you to be able to figure out on your own.”

I’m excited for the new class. I’m sorry to say the Coursera one was really bringing my motivation down because it didn’t make any sense to me. Not to say all of the classes at Coursera or even in the Data Science Track are bad, but this one was. I may return to it after learning more R, because I cannot continue with the track without it, but we’ll see.

So far, I like aspects of edX more than Coursera. While neither provide certificates upon completion of a course without paying for it, edX allows you to take quizzes and do graded assignments for free, while they are blocked on Coursera. Having access to graded assignments is a huge benefit because I can see how well I am doing and it encourages me to do all the coursework.

At this time, I’m actually alright not obtaining certificates for the classes I am taking. Learning about the concepts and how to utilize them is far more important to me.

My new class

I signed up for The Analytics Edge right at the end of the course, so I can’t turn in the quizzes or assignments for credit because it’s past their due dates, but I can still complete them.

I like the format much better than the Coursera classes I have taken. I am not trying to diss Coursera or Johns Hopkins University, and I really appreciate that they offer free classes, but from my limited exposure, I feel that the courses need to be reworked. At minimum, the R Programming course.

In the first day of my analytics class, I already learned more than I did in two weeks of the Coursera class. That is incredibly encouraging!

I was already learning how to read data sets and doing so as I learned the commands. Everyone learns differently, but I learn best by doing. Seeing the instructor working in R at the same time is extremely helpful for me. A transcript of the lecture is displayed on the right side of the screen, highlighting the current sentence, while R or other lecture material is displayed on the video.

Another cool feature of the edX class is that we are working with recent datasets. The one dataset I worked with for my programming assignment on Coursera was a list of air pollution data from 2003. Working with current data doesn’t help you learn how to analyze it any better, but I like it nonetheless.

In the first full lecture series, I ran an analysis on a bunch of data from the World Health Organization, looked at it in different types of plots, and isolated variables to obtain information. The second lecture involved analyzing food data from the USDA.

It’s awesome to be apply commands in order to read large amounts of data. I am very happy with this class so far and I highly recommend it for beginners. It’s not technically an R class, but the instruction centers around it.

Math updates

I am just over halfway through my geometry lessons and quizzes with Khan Academy. There are proofs scattered around different geometric topics, but I’m happy to be complete with lesson after lesson of nonstop proofs (my dismay from last week). I’m hoping to be done with geometry by next week, and then I'll move on to algebra II.

That is according to my estimations based on how much I have left, but we’ll see how it goes!

So, that’s all folks! I’m really excited about my analytics class and I can’t wait to keep learning more. Thanks for your support and I’ll see you next week.