A few weeks ago, I completed Coursera's Computing for Data Analysis 5 week course, and thought I'd offer my thoughts on the course. I've shared some of them on the Sloan Consortium's LinkedIn group , but thought I'd clean them up a bit for a blog post. The professor for the course, Richard Eng, posted his thoughts on the course on his Simply Statistics blog . The course focused on using the R statistical software package, something I've had a passing familiarity with, but not a working knowledge of. As a result, I was in a good position to take this course. In addition, I have a few projects that require large amounts of statistical analysis, so I was highly motivated to learn the material. I really liked that videos that covered new concepts were relatively short (< 7 min.) while videos demonstrating how to use technology were longer (< 15 min.) This chunking of the content, with emphasis on modeling behaviors, helped me to pace myself and quickly