Udacity aims to teach 160,000 students statistics

Whoever wrote the article should take the course. Lots of numbers are wrong. The plot was wrong -- MIT would take over 2000 years to reach 160,000 students with the intro stats course, not 40. Of course, it's actually a bit less than that -- most MIT students take some course that includes stats. One name per second is over a day, not 4 hours and 27 minutes. Etc.<p>I tried to post a correction, but it's 'awaiting moderation'. Traditional technique for scammy magazines for avoiding negative comments.

This is just an introductory course (as stated in the original article) that I'm signed up for, more to see what it's like than to learn the material (after 5 years of econometrics and 3 years of statistics I'd like to think I knew this stuff). Not the only course I've signed up for (Logic and Discrete maths etc.) but the only one where they got in touch asking us to push it to others - they're obviously trying to break some sort of record with this one. Which I hope they manage. Given how much regular university education costs I'm hoping this catches on before any of my kids want to go.

Has anyone done codecademy before or any other free online programming course and how does this Udactiy compares to those? What would you suggest for a total beginner, start off with Udacity? Or together with other courses to replace each other's weaknesses?<p>Is Udacity specialize for teaching programming? Or like MitX where they are just free online education providers?

I'm taking CS101 (Python) from Udacity now. Loving it: such a nifty little system they have of getting this information across.<p>Is the Stats class going to be just basic stats? or are they going to show programming methods for stats?

40 or 50 thousand (at the very best) will end up actually taking the course though...<p>Still, impressive.

A single lecture of the most simple and most significant equation everybody should know:<p>youtu.be/umFnrvcS6AQ<p>The rest is distraction in the current "economy".

So it's a bunch of video lectures covering material combined with exercises you can do to check your own reasoning?<p>Congratulations, you've invented the textbook. In video form! Don't get me wrong, a textbook is a nice useful resource, but it's not some kind of "revolution in higher education". The option has always been there to learn stats 101 from the book.

Have also signed up.