Student blogs

Teachers

Our course leader was Sofia Carlsson. She gave us some of the lectures, morning reviews, and all the digital assignments. We also had many guest teachers to teach us their studies and different topics about study methods.

Course Themes

These are the main topics we learned.

Course schedule

This was a 5-week hybrid course which combined face-to-face and online teaching. The course leader decided to start the class at 9:30 to avoid the crowds in the morning for those who use public transportations. Additionally, 2-hour lunch break was set to go home from campus for the afternoon online lectures. Our day was started with 30 minutes review of the day before lecture or individual assignment. In the morning, we learned a topic of the day and we worked on an online group assignment about the topic in the afternoon. Tuesdays were set as an individual reading day from the textbook and the teacher gave us individual assignments every Fridays.

Assignments

• week 1: Disease measures
• week 2: Random error
• week 3: Systematic errors
• week 4: Group assignment

The assignment 1 to 3 were individual assignments and maximum 10 points for each were added to the final grade. The assignment 4 was a group assignment included a 10 minutes presentation.

Group Assignment

Our task was to design a cohort study based on a database to investigate the relationship between an exposure and outcome of our choice. Things that we needed to consider and discuss while designing your study were:

1. Formulate a research question
2. Choose the study base
3. Define an exposure and outcome
4. Confounders
5. Measure of disease
6. Random error
7. Systematic error (Bias)
8. Limitation/Strength

Exam

The final exam was provided in class and was paper-based exam. There were many computational questions and some descriptive questions. Maximum points on written exam was 70p and we got 30p from the individual assignments.  

Grades: 

Pass with distinction ≥85% correct answers on the written exam (70p*0.85=59.5+30=89.5p (or more))

Pass ≥70% correct answers on the written exam (70p*0.70=49+30=79p (or more)

Finally

Overall this course gave me basic knowledge about study design and methods which are used in scientific researches. Especially, in the final group assignment, we had to use all the skills and knowledges we have learned throughout this entire course. Since this was our second course of the program, enjoyed more to have discussions with classmates and work together through zoom.

I hope this review helped you to get to know about our program. Feel free to contact me if you have any kind of questions! Arigato 🙂

Sakura