Source: Stanford
Does eating red meat increase your risk of being in a traffic accident? Should you be worried about lead in lipstick? These and other provocative medical questions will be analyzed and discussed in the Stanford School of Medicine’s new online course “Statistics in Medicine.”
This nine-week massive open online course — or MOOC, for short — aims to provide students with a foundational understanding of probability and statistics, teaching them the skills required to critically evaluate statistics in medical studies. It also shows students how to analyze and avoid common statistical pitfalls with their own research data.
“Statistics in Medicine” will use real-world examples from medical literature and popular media to reinforce its lessons. The course instructor, Kristin Sainani, PhD, is a clinical assistant professor of health research and policy and is a recipient of several teaching awards from Stanford’s graduate program in epidemiology. Her first MOOC, “Writing in the Sciences,” has had almost 70,000 students register since it launched last fall. The self-paced version of both of these courses can taken at any time, minus homework evaluations and teaching assistant support.