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Coursera courses on R: complete list ranked by “popularity”

December 4th, 2013 in R Programming

The DataCamp Team

Coursera – an online education startup – has rapidly expanded its curriculum of statistics and data analysis courses. Today, there are already 33 modules that are directly linked to the field, excluding the courses where statistics and data science are solely used as a supportive tool (e.g. finance). These courses make use of multiple statistical software packages like Python, MATLAB and of course R. This post lists all Coursera courses on R. I decided to make a list of all Coursera courses on R. These courses use R as either their first choice, or as one of the many statistical software packages that are allowed to be used by students to perform the homework's assignment. Coursera does not publish all data on how many students enroll in their courses, but most (some?) courses reach well over a hundred thousand students each year. To have some kind of indication of their popularity, I list below all Coursera courses on R ranked by the number of facebook likes:


Ranking	Courese title	Professor	University	Facebook likes	Tweets
1	Social Network Analysis	Lada Adamic	University of Michigan	12000	3543
2	Statistics one	Andrew Conway	Princeton University	9600	1421
3	Computing for Data Analysis	Roger Peng	John Hopkins University	8500	1934
4	Data Analysis	Jeff Leek	John Hopkins University	5200	1408
5	Introduction to Data Science	Bill Howe	University of Washington	2600	1103
6	Introduction to Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics	Eric Zivot	University of Washington	2100	351
7	Mathematical Biostatistics Boot Camp 1	Brian Caffo	John Hopkins University	1400	239
8	Statistics: Making Sense of Data	Alison Gibs & Jeffey Rosenthal	University of Toronto	1400	243
9	Asset Pricing	John H. Cochrane	University of Chicago Booth	855	102
10	Mathematical Methods for Quantitative Finance	Kjell Konis	University of Washington	635	92
11	Case-Based Introduction to Biostatistics	Scott L. Zeger	John Hopkins University	424	110
12	Financial Engineering 2	Martin Haugh & Garud Iyengar	Coumbia University	109	13
13	Data Analysis and statistical inference	Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel	Duke University	80	18
14	Core Concepts in Data Analysis	Boris Mirkin	Higher School of Economics	77	15
15	Mathematical Biostatistics Boot Camp 2	Brian Caffo	John Hopkins University	60	21

Given the unwillingness of Coursera's search function, I had to manually draft the list above. Therefore, it is possible that I overlooked some of the courses. Feel free to mention them in the comment section, and I will make sure to update the list. In case you are interested in taking (or teaching) interactive data analysis courses, make sure to have a look at our own educational startup DataMind.While I expect that most of you are familiar with Coursera, for those who don't, this is a quick summary: Coursera is one of the leading providers of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Today they have more than 100+ institutional partners offering 500+ courses to over 5 million students worldwide. So despite being criticized by some, it is becoming more and more clear that they are here to stay.