Study Design for Veterinary Epidemiological Research (online)

This course teaches study design for veterinary epidemiological research, focusing on those aspects specific to animal health. You will encounter typical confounders in veterinary epidemiology, such as breed and parity, but also get to work with clustered sampling, such as by farm, and diagnostics without a gold standard. During the course, you will learn that these concepts are relevant for human epidemiology as well.

You will learn to apply epidemiological know-how and statistical methods during hands-on computer practical and lectures.

Veterinary Epidemiology is broad concept therefore there were multiple online courses created. These courses can be ordered in a bundle. This bundle consists out of 3 online courses: Study Design in Veterinary Epidemiology, Epidemiology of Animal Infectious Diseases and Hands-on Veterinary Epidemiology. The bundle offers 20% discount, read more about it here.

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

• understand the specific issues in veterinary epidemiology, such as clustered occurrence of disease, specific veterinary confounders, such as breed and parity
• be able to analyse a veterinary data set following a structured approach
• understand and be able to describe study designs for diagnostic test evaluation with and without gold standard
• recognize sampling schemes for prevalence estimation and to determine freedom-from-disease, and do power-calculations for basic sampling designs

3 weeks, 14 hours per week (online)

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.

Veterinary Epidemiology is broad concept therefore there were multiple online courses created. These courses can be ordered in a bundle. This bundle consists out of 3 online courses: Study Design in Veterinary Epidemiology, Epidemiology of Animal Infectious Diseases and Hands-on Veterinary Epidemiology. The bundle offers 20% discount, read more about it here.

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.

To enroll in this course, you need:

• Completed course Modern Methods in Data Analysis (or equivalent course)
• Basic Skill in R (or in another computer language such as Python or C++)
• Sufficient proficiency in English reading and writing

For this course, the following book is used: ‘Veterinary Epidemiology: An Introduction’ by Dirk Pfeiffer, 2010. ISBN: 978-1-4051-7694-1 The book by Dirk Pfeiffer is also available as a PDF file for participants in this course. You can download the book in the learning activities.

For further and more in-depth reading, we recommend: ‘Veterinary Epidemiologic Research, Second Edition’ by Ian Dohoo, Wayne Martin & Henrik Stryhn (2010) – ISBN-13: 978-0-919013-60-5