The course I'm course coordinator for is Applied Statistics. The course is for anyone who wants
to get a basic knowledge of statistics to start off. So you might have done no statistics
before and this is your first course, or it might be that you're wanting to get a bit
of background having done it previously, and want to come back to it. So in terms of the
sorts of people that might do this, they could be health professionals, you could be a researcher
that's not clinical, so maybe working in health services research but not a clinician yourself.
I help you do the statistics yourself but will also highlight when you need to go to
an expert for perhaps more complicated projects. So a reason to come to Aberdeen for this course
will be that it's taught by some very experienced statisticians: we've been teaching the content
and other content for a number of years. We’ve got different experiences, we come from different
disciplines, working in different disciplines, so we can frame examples suited to you. So
if you’re struggling to understand the particular concept we’ll be able to reframe it in a
way that you would understand for your field, using examples from your field. The advantage
of Aberdeen also is that the online platform is well established: we've got good software
that uses different tools so you can do things very remotely. So you don't have to be here,
it is entirely online, and there is no requirement for any sort of face-to-face contact. Although
we do use virtual classrooms we do get you to interact that way, but it's not an essential
component. We start from asking “what is a variable?” right up to building into different
relationships between a combination of variables that allow you to answer a different research
question. To help your career it will be handy because if you are doing your own research
then you might need to do a bit of statistics yourself, so this course will enable you to
be able to do that. You will have learnt the basic tools to actually go away to collect
some data, do the initial bits of analysis, and maybe answer some of the questions. You'll
be able to understand other people's research so if you're reading literature you can understand
what they've done, how they’ve done it correctly, or perhaps they shouldn't have done it like
that, how to improve so if you want to do something very similar, you want to make a
better study, you can think well actually that wasn't the best way of doing it. But
having learnt stuff on this course you then know which way to do it instead. It would
potentially help as you're progressing up the research ladder, if you want to become
someone who's going to be in charge of research projects, not just working on them, then some
statistical knowledge would really be helpful there because it’ll help you understand
what needs to go into the application to get the funding for a starter, how it works, and
how to help the researchers themselves go up a level. So it’s extremely useful going
forwards. The Applied Statistics course is run entirely online: the course is split into
weekly themes and within that theme you will get podcasts, you might have some multiple
choice questions to do which aren't assessed but are there to help you learn, and you can
do them as many times as you like. You might have some activities around actually undertaking
the statistics, using some data that we provide, asking some questions, playing around with
it yourself, understanding the software that we use which you will get access to, and being
able to actually think about: here’s some data, what's my question, what's the answer.
We sometimes have discussion boards where we will ask you to discuss amongst yourselves
with the different students, or we might have a live session where you come in to a virtual
classroom and we’ve got activities associated with that. So you'll get to interact directly,
face-to-face, virtually, but face to face, and you can also use that facility to interact
with other students at any time. So with the Applied Statistics course within one of the
weekly themes we might expect you to watch up to about an hour of podcast material which
we’ve broken down into smaller chunks, and then the associated activities that go with
that material might take you up to another 2 hours of work. So we’re looking at around
3 hours of effort or engagement with the online material per week. Over the course the whole
time you put in, with maybe some additional self-study time for the assessment of the
different investigations, you’re probably looking at around 100-150 hours of engagement over the whole course.