As the entire East Coast gets soaked by Hurricane Sandy, I can’t help but think that this is the perfect time to…take a course online! Well, as long as you have electricity, that is. I live in a heavily tree-lined area and so it’s only a matter of time before the lights cut out on me (I’d better type quickly!). 

I just finished teaching my course Computing for Data Analysis through Coursera. This was my first experience teaching a course online and definitely my first experience teaching a course to > 50,000 people. There were definitely some bumps along the road, but the students who participated were fantastic at helping me smooth the way. In particular, the interaction on the discussion forums was very helpful. I couldn’t have done it without the students’ help. So, if you took my course over the past 4 weeks, thanks for participating!

Here are a couple quick stats on the course participation (as of today) for the curious:

• 50,899: Number of students enrolled
• 27,900: Number of users watching lecture videos
• 459,927: Total number of streaming views (over 4 weeks)
• 414,359: Total number of video downloads (not all courses allow this)
• 14,375: Number of users submitting the weekly quizzes (graded)
• 6,420: Number of users submitting the bi-weekly R programming assignments (graded)
• 6393+3291: Total number of posts+comments to the discussion forum
• 314,302: Total number of views in the discussion forum

I’ve received a number of emails from people who signed up in the middle of the course or after the course finished. Given that it was a 4-week course, signing up in the middle of the course meant you missed quite a bit of material. I will eventually be closing down the Coursera version of the course—at this point it’s not clear when it will be offered again on that platform but I would like to do so—and so access to the course material will be restricted. However, I’d like to make that material more widely available even if it isn’t in the Coursera format.

So I’m announcing today that next month I’ll be offering the Simply Statistics Edition of Computing for Data Analysis. This will be a slightly simplified version of the course that was offered on Coursera since I don’t have access to all of the cool platform features that they offer. But all of the original content will be available, including some new material that I hope to add over the coming weeks.

If you are interested in taking this course or know of someone who is, please check back here soon for more details on how to sign up and get the course information.