This year almost 150 participants registered for ESRM, a 50% increase on the previous year. Attendees were a mixture of students from 4 MSc courses, research students, and staff.
The ESRM module covers two full weeks at the beginning of the MPH course and can be challenging due to the amount of information covered. Despite this, students’ feedback indicated that it was a well received and organized course. The small group teaching sessions for the module were one aspect that the students particularly favored, in that they reported that the “small group discussions gave a chance to apply the learning from the previous day to real examples of published work”. In addition, this year for the first time all lecture notes, exercises and papers formed a booklet for the module which the students liked and appreciated.
This year was also the first time the epidemiology material was taught before the majority of the statistics lectures. This enabled stats lecturers to more freely discuss methods in the context of different epidemiological study designs and students found this beneficial.
With regards to future improvements, feedback has indicated that many students found the STATA sessions challenging. In light of this, next academic year an introductory STATA video will be made available before the ESRM module begins and pre-recorded walkthroughs of each of the STATA practical’s will be posted on CANVAS.’ Some of the other ESRM lectures will also be pre-recorded so that students will be able to listen to them again at a later date to clear up any misunderstandings and help with exam revision for the course.
Written by Claire Frobisher, Module Coordinator for Epidemiology and Malcolm Price, Module Coordinator for Statistics
