Incorporating Material From The Web Into A Biostatistics Course

• Activity Number: 112
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 12, 2002 : 12:00 PM to 1:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences*
• Author(s): Andrea Berghold*+
• Affiliation(s): University of Graz
• Keywords: teaching ; medical students ; computer-based education

Abstract

A large amount of statistics educational material is available on the Worldwide Web. In an effort to get students acquainted with the use of this material, a course was set up where every student had access to a computer connected to the Web. The aim was to strengthen statistical concepts through the use of simulations, enable them to perform simple statistical analysis on their own, and motivate self-learning activities.

The course covers the standard introductory contents from common study designs, basic descriptive statistics to simple linear regression. About twenty medical students (higher semesters) voluntarily took part in this thirty-hour course. Further, a lot of practical exercises were presented. Data sets were available from a bulletin board for analysis with a statistical software package (SPSS), which was introduced during the course.

Initial experience shows that the students' response to this course was very positive. They believe that learning over the Web is a valuable additional study method. However, the available computer skills in this group were below expectation, and it took a fair amount of instructor involvement and energy to enable the group to use the tools.