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Abstract:
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Background: Modern public health graduate schools are frequently turning to fully or partially online courses to teach introductory statistics, which offers new challenges and opportunities from a pedagogical perspective. Methods: Online learning resources have been developed for teaching both fully online and flipped courses. Passive learning is done using recorded lecture and tutorial videos, and active learning utilizes quizzes, discussion prompts, example problems, and graded problem sets. Results: Online courses can reach a wide variety of students and hybrid courses allow for more of class time to be used for active learning which deepens student understanding of material. However, students have difficulty sitting through full-length lecture videos and may express concern with the quantity of content to parse. A flipped classroom can be divisive to students, and a balance must be struck between making in-person sessions robust enough to be valuable while being shortened to offset out-of-class instruction. Conclusion: Online instruction may provide a more enjoyable and effective learning environment, but must be presented in a different way from traditional in-person courses.
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