Udacity - A/B Testing Review

A/B Testing Review is an intermediate data science course built by Google offered on the Udacity MOOC platform. The short 5-lesson course covers the basics of the A/B or split testing: a method of testing different versions of a website or app to inform the creation and introduction of new features. The course beings with a general introduction to A/B testing followed by a short lesson on ethics and then 3 longer lessons on choosing experiment metrics, designing experiments and evaluating results.


The course follows the same structure as other Udacity offerings, with relatively short video segments interspersed with quizzes. The videos are clean and the instructors are clear. The course does not have regular homework sets or programming exercises after lessons: instead, there is a final project after lesson 5. Udacity is moving toward forgoing regular exercises in favor of large projects, in part, because large projects can act as portfolio builders for students. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but tackling an entire project all at once can be daunting. Letting students cut their teeth early by completing pieces of the project after each lesson would likely lead to a higher completion rate and better projects.


A/B Testing is a nice introduction to split testing but its brevity and lack of assignments after each lesson hold it back. Short courses, especially self-paced ones, are hard to execute well because students need consistent practice to really learn and retain material.


I give this course 3.5 out of 5 stars: Good.