Bridging Course
Course Title
Course Responsible
Teachers
Name | Department | City | |
---|---|---|---|
Birthe Marie Rasmussen | bmrasmussen@health.sdu.dk | ||
Gabriele Berg-Beckhoff | gbergbeckhoff@health.sdu.dk | ||
Line Remmen | lremmen@health.sdu.dk |
Course secretary
Aim and overall content
Mandatory prerequisites
Relationship between the learning objectives, type of teaching and type of examination
After participating in the module, the student should be able to:
- Describe the most commonly used study designs and frequently used epidemiological terms
- Calculate basic epidemiological measurements
- Evaluate the quality of scientific (quantitative) articles along with risk of bias and confounding
- Describe basic biostatical concepts and when to use which
- Analyse small datasets descriptively and look for associations
- Interpret statistical results and evaluate significance
Learning Objectives - Knowledge
- Descriptive and analytical epidemiology
- Study designs: ecological study, cross sectional study, cohort study and case-control study.
- Measurements: incidence, prevalence, mortality, RR, OR and different kinds of standardizations + other measures.
- Concepts: Causality, bias (information bias, selection bias) and confounding
- Descriptive biostatistics: variables, graphs, tables (frequency, two-by-two)
- Inferential statistics: t-tests, chi2-tests, correlation, ANOVA, linear regressions and logistic regressions.
- Concepts: Significance, p-values and confidence Interval
Learning Objectives - Skills
Through the module the student will be able to:
Epidemiology
- Critically assess the quality of scientific studies
- Evaluate whether scientific results are reliable and/or relevant to consider
- Discuss strengths and weaknesses of scientific studies and suggest ways to improve quality
Biostatistics
- Conduct basic statistics (within same areas as described under knowledge) in the statistical programme STATA
- Conduct both crude and adjusted models in STATA and check for possible confounding effects
- Interpret basic output from statistics made in STATA and evaluate the significance of results
Learning Objectives - Competencies
Through the module the student will practice:
- Communication (oral and written) of knowledge and skills
- Collaboration with other student
The student will be able to:
- Identify individual learning needs and structure individual learning in different learning environments
Recommended literature
- Kirkwood. B.R and Sterne J.A.C (2016 3rd ed.) Essential medical Statistics, Blackwell Science (can be found as an online book at SDU library)
- Compendium: ‘Introduction to Epidemiology’ by G. Berg-Beckhoff and W. Hellmeier (will be provided).
Content (changes may occur)
First 7 weeks (calendar week 27-34 incl. 1 week of holiday)
Week 8 (calendar week 35)
Teaching format and feedback
The course will be held in two parts.
The first part (first seven weeks) is an online internet-based course with mainly automatic feedback and/or peer feedback. The online part of the course will consist of e-tivities, each focusing on a specific topic within three main areas; Philosophy of Science, epidemiology and biostatistics. All e-tivities use multiple learning activities such as readings, video and audio podcasts, wikis, hyperlinks for relevant webpages, knowledge tests and exercises. There will be several possibilities for feedback through automatic knowledge test, exercises and personally through discussions forums where students can ask questions.
Expected student workload in this course
The ECTS value of this course is 7,5 ECTS corresponding to a student workload of 210 hours.
In total there will be 23 teaching hours, leaving 187 hours for self-study and preparation. The student should expect on an average to spend 26-27 hours per week on this module.