Hands-on Veterinary Epidemiology (online)

As one of the very few online medical courses in veterinary epidemiology that is available, this course is highly suitable for veterinary researchers with an interest in epidemiology. It is taught by epidemiologists from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, and forms part of the MSc Epidemiology program of the UMC Utrecht and Utrecht University.

Hands-on means Hands-on in this course! We might even call it a master-class in veterinary epidemiological research. This course offers you the opportunity to practice and improve your skills in analyzing animal health data. You will go through the process of formulating a hypothesis, visualizing and analyzing data, interpretation the results, and reporting.

For this course you are allowed (and encouraged) to work on you own data set. This data set needs to fulfill certain criteria:

• It is about epidemiology of animal diseases or a zoonosis
• You have access to the data
• The data analysis is not yet completed or you would like to investigate another subset of the data
• Preferably the data is gathered during observational research, but RCT’s or animal experiments can sometimes be interesting as well

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Perform the analyses required for a veterinary disease epidemiological research
• Interpret results in the context of the research question for veterinary disease epidemiological research

3 week, 14 hours per week

During the course, you will be guided while working on this project by epidemiologists and statisticians. The week ends with presenting the results of your work both written and orally.

Even though you can manage your own time our courses are not intended as individual education. We offer personalized online learning with lots of interaction with peer students, the E-moderator and lecturers. Flexibility from students, a positive attitude towards teachers and peers and the willingness to learn together and help each other is invaluable to our courses. To experience maximum interaction, we advise you to log on several times per week.

Note that the starting dates of courses, interim deadlines, and dates of exams are fixed, but you can choose when and where you want to watch web lectures and work on assignments. The e-moderator of the course will inform you about the beginning of the course and about deadlines during the course.

The average required study workload for the courses of MSc Epidemiology Postgraduate Online is 14 hours per week. You will need this time to study, to keep up with the assignments and course material.

To enroll in this course, you need:

• Basic skill in R (or in another computer language such as Python or C++)
• Sufficient proficiency in English reading and writing

Please note that this course is part of an existing program within the Graduate School of Life Sciences. Tuitition fees may alter during the year.