Edx + Microsoft Course on R

I participated in some courses in Coursera, with very interesting subjects. For the first time I decided to enroll in a course in edx, and I ended up in a Microsoft Data Camp course on R. The course is very basic, mostly on syntax than in statistics. Good enough. The course is based in 5 to 6 minutes videos, and then some exercises done online. Although too basic, the course was interesting enough for me, as I did not know anything on R.

But what really annoyed me was the final evaluation. First, the instructions claim we will have 4 minutes per question… but the timer starts at 3 minutes. Well.. Microsoft… Then, instead of having questions on using R for some interesting tasks (take this data, change it, then plot) the exam is a set of puzzle questions, with placeholder we need to fill to obtain some result. Yes, when using R we will be faced with puzzles. And worse, there is no pause button. I understand you might want to limit the time to answer to each question, but why not to pause in between questions? Specially when you are at home and someone rings your door bell. Well, after 20 minutes or so at the door, I returned to the exam, and still got 75%.

And, OK, I did not pay for a verified certificate. But at least you could show a digital certificate we might print and show. OK, I’ll get back to Coursera. See you, edX!

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