Data Analysis with R
Signature Course No. 130 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Data Analysis with R course, in the Personal Effectiveness & Well-Being category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
You work on one running dataset alongside the Coach throughout: the Coach teaches and questions, you read, tidy, summarise, join, chart, model, and report, and what you produce is what gets checked.
This is the course for analysts who produce the numbers other people present, managers who are handed summaries and charts and need to know which question each one actually answers, operators and team leads who live in exports and spreadsheets today, and anyone moving from clicking to scripting.
It works in the order the craft itself runs: first, Module 1 — Shaping Data You Can Trust — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Reconciled Dataset; then, Module 2 — Answers You Can Defend — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Report Another Analyst Can Re-Run.
You finish by proving the whole course — in The Reconciled Dataset and in The Report Another Analyst Can Re-Run. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free. The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
This course runs on one company, one dataset, and nothing else: every count is computed from the figures in Concept 2's chain, and any number in Concept 16 can be traced back to that chain and checked. Code is an argument, not an answer — an R script does not know anything, and an R course that will not submit to its own arithmetic has no business teaching anyone else's.
Tools are taught as reasoning moves, never as incantations. Statistical inference beyond reading a first model's fit, modelling beyond a single-predictor line, database connections, interactive outputs, and package development are deliberately excluded: each exclusion is a candidate for a successor course.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a cleaned, reconciled analysis dataset with a written audit note, and a complete, reproducible Quarto report another analyst can re-run end to end — not just ideas about analysis.
This is the one hundred and thirtieth course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
Already enrolled? Enter the course →
Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the rows, not the summary. A summary is only as honest as the rows underneath it, and most bad analysis is decided before the first summary is ever computed. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Reconciled Dataset for Module 1 and The Report Another Analyst Can Re-Run for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Every organisation tells its story twice: once in meetings, and once in its data. The meetings are confident. The data is what actually happened — what was ordered, what was returned, which customers came back, and which numbers quietly changed meaning halfway through the year. This course teaches you to work the second story in R: to get data in without trusting it blindly, to shape it until each row means one thing, to summarise it without fooling yourself, to join tables without multiplying money, to choose charts that tell the truth at a glance, to fit a simple model and read it the way a careful manager should, and to hand the whole analysis to someone else as a reproducible report they can re-run and check. R is the tool. Judgment is the subject. By the end, the code you write will be short — because the thinking in front of it will be doing the heavy lifting.
What you will learn
- Get data into R, inspect what actually arrived, and clean it through a chain you can reconcile
- Recognise tidy data and reshape messy tables until every row means one thing
- Use the core dplyr verbs — filter, select, arrange, mutate, summarise, group_by — as reasoning moves, not syntax tricks
- Join tables on keys without losing rows or counting money twice
- Work honestly with dates, strings, and categories as they actually arrive in business data
- Choose and build ggplot2 charts that show the truth — the right geometry, the honest scale
- Summarise groups with correct weights and rates, and fit and read a simple regression without overstating it
- Validate and reconcile every result, then report it reproducibly in R Markdown or Quarto
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Data Analysis with R, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Reconciled Dataset and The Report Another Analyst Can Re-Run
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the person whose numbers must reconcile
Data Analysis with R is for analysts who produce the numbers other people present, managers who are handed summaries, dashboards, and charts, operators and team leads who live in exports and spreadsheets today, and anyone moving from clicking to scripting who wants a repeatable, checkable way to answer the same questions every month.
This is a Personal Effectiveness & Well-Being course and it assumes no prior R experience and no statistics degree. It assumes comfort with arithmetic, a willingness to type code and read error messages without flinching, and a computer on which R and RStudio can be installed — the rest is built here, concept by concept, on one dataset you will come to know very well.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Reconciled Dataset
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Data Analysis with R is Signature Course No. 130. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.