Statistics and data literacy for non-statisticians (Udemy.com)
Learn the key terms and analysis methods in statistics
Created by: Mike X Cohen
Last updated August 2026
What you will learn
- Important terms in statistics
- Overviews of the most important statistical methods
Quality Score
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Overall Score : 90 / 100
Course Description
Welcome to this short course on statistics literacy! The purpose of this course is to teach you about basic statistics terminology and foundational concepts. You will learn the meaning of key terms in statistics, such as p-value, ANOVA, variance, t-test, etc.
If you are brand-new to statistics, then this is the right course for you. It’s a beginner-level course, so if you’ve already taken a statistics course, or read a statistics book, then you might find all of the material covered in this course to be familiar. In that case, you can browse through the course and see if there are some concepts you need to brush up on. You don’t necessarily need to go through the entire course in order — you can skip around to the videos you are most interested in learning from.
By the end of this course, you will feel more comfortable talking about and reading about commonly used statistical analysis methods. You’ll also be able to engage in conversations with people who focus on technical or statistical issues, business analytics, and so on.
Please note that this course does not cover the math of the analyses, nor software to perform statistical analyses. I show a few basic formulas, but the focus is much more on conceptual understanding than mathematical detail.
Instructor Details
- 4.5 Rating
2,576 Reviews
Mike X Cohen
I am a full-time educator and writer, and former professor of neuroscience. I "retired" from that position so I could focus my time and energy creating high-quality educational material just for you.
I have 20 years of experience teaching programming, data analysis, signal processing, statistics, linear algebra, and experiment design. I've taught undergraduate students, PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and full professors. I have taught in "traditional" university courses, special week-long intensive courses, and Nobel prize-winning research labs. I have >100 hours of online lectures on neuroscience data analysis that you can find on my website and youtube channel. And I've written several technical books about these topics with a few more on the way.
I'm not trying to show off -- I'm trying to convince you that you've come to the right place to maximize your learning from an instructor who has spent two decades refining and perfecting his teaching style.
Over 350,000 students have watched over 50,000,000 minutes of my courses. Come find out why!
I have several free courses that you can enroll in. Try them out! You got nothing to lose ;)
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MATLAB programming: Get Started with MATLAB; Master MATLAB; Image Processing
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Reviews
By Zafia qayyum on 1/7/2026
“I highly recommend this course for anyone who wants to understand statistics without getting overwhelmed by technical jargon. It covers essential concepts such as data types, summary statistics, basic visualization, and interpreting results in a clear and practical manner. The pace was perfect, and the teaching style was very accessible.”
By A K VAMSI KRISHNA REDDY on 6/29/2025
This short course has been helpful in understanding the basics of statistics inclufing distributions, p-values, ANOVA etc. Mike's teaching style and his dedication to prepartion of slides is wonderful. It lays doen the fundamentals of statistics and builds the interest to learn more.
By Jessica Matts on 6/29/2024
The course basically covered theory only with no real world application or problems to work on. As well as stating some aspects of the topics could be 'ignored' when being looked at in real world application. I may have rated it higher, but I took this course after taking another intro to statistics course that actually gave some examples & quizzes.
By Chihiro KAWAHARA on 6/16/2023
As a complete newbie for the statistics (and non-native English speaker), I wish there were clear explanation/word definitions/ terminology. Many weren't cleared to me.
By Bryan Parker on 6/10/2023
Awesome overview of statistics. Did statistics years ago. Was a nice refresh before proceeding with a more in-depth course. This is I think the first course I actually completed from start to finish on Udemy (started several others, but still plodding through them all). This one actually got done! Completed!
By Zhanna Orlova on 4/9/2021
This is a 'cheat-sheet' stats course. Covers all practical stats concepts and principles. I think it can be useful to prepare for taking a graduate stats course and as a refresher along with a heavy stats course. Helps you to structure stats in your mind.
By Christopher Lopez on 3/29/2021
This course contains a serie of lectures that are very straightforward, clear in basic topics on statistics. The instructor have the capability to explain in a simple way this topics and develop the lectures in a way that you enjoy and catch your interest
By Isaia Lawaniyasana on 12/21/2020
Very good and informative course. Excellent flow of ideas between chapters and videos and very easy to understand explanations and examples, which are relevant to the ideas being taught. An excellent introduction to Statistics, that non-statisticians can easily follow. Glad I took this course.
By Colin Chouthi on 11/8/2020
Explains complex subjects very well, in easy bitesize chunks that can be used for either learning, revising and understanding statistical concepts. Useful for Data Science and Machine learning preparation to understand the stats theory that underpins Data Science and Machine Learning. Other of Mr Cohen's courses that I have bought are very good. Thoroughly recommend!!
By Kinkini Bhadra on 6/16/2020
It is a great to go course for basic statistics and especially if you are a beginner. I wish there were more examples comparing theory with the statistics considering the neural data. However, as a 90 min course, its like a super capsule even if you are just here to brush up your statistics. Thanks Mike!










