Student blogs

Teachers

The Course director was Nicola Orsini. He taught us the most of the lectures, but we also had 2 teachers to teach some of the topics. In the supervised lab, 2 teaching assistants (TA) were there to help us for coding.

Course Themes

These are the main topics we learned.

• Introduction to Stata statistical software
• Summary statistics of quantitative variables
• Contingency tables
• Basic probability theory
• Binomial, Poisson, and normal distributions
• Central Limit Theorem
• Confidence intervals
• Testing hypothesis
• Types of error
• Comparison of two or more population means and proportions
• Nonparametric methods
• Correlation and odds ratio

Course Schedule

This was a 5-week online course. The online classes started at 10:00, so that students could have time to review course topics or read the textbook chapters of the day before the class. In the morning, teachers gave us online lectures and we had 2 hours lunch before afternoon supervised/unsupervised lab. Every Friday, week-review quizzes were given and maximum 5 points for each were included the final grade.

Assignments

In week 3, the course director gave us an home assignment which is maximum 10 points included the final grade. We were asked to demonstrate that we learned the fundamentals of Stata language in order to open, manage, describe, visualize data and perform statistical inference on population parameters based on a sample.

Group Work

Every student has been randomly assigned to one group to complete one task at one point in time. There were two weekly group activities. Completing the task was worth max 5 points.

Group “Muddy”

The goal of this group was to monitor, collect, and organize individual responses about the following question: What was the “muddiest” moment of the week?

Group “Review”

The goal of this group was to review the material covered during the week and answer the following question: What have we learned last week?

Exam

Although all the lectures were taught online, the final exam was provided in class. We were assigned into 2 classrooms to keep distance between each other and were asked to wear face masks.

Grades:

• Weekly groups activities (max 5 points)
• Weekly individual quizzes (max 20 points)
• Stata individual assignment (max 10 points)
• Final exam (max 65 points)
• Total score (max 100 points)

The grades used are fail, pass, or pass with distinction. To “pass” the course students must attain 65 points or more of the total score. Students with 91 points or more of the total score received “pass with distinction“.

Finally

I was worried about learning Biostatistics ONLINE! However, the course structures were very clear and we helped each other in and out of the classes (e.g. working together in the lab time and asking classmates through Whatsapp group chat). Importantly, Both review groups and muddy groups worked hard to make it clear what we have learned.

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