Janet Pritchard

Course

LIFESCI 3LL3 | Living Systems Laboratory Practicum | 95 students

Their story

This brand new course was designed to teach our Life Sciences students about biostatistics, which is a challenging topic to teach in a lab setting for the first time online, and to 3 times the number of students that the course was originally planned for!

I would like to think that the enrollment in this course grew quickly due to the students’ keen interest in biostatistics, or their desire to take a 3 hour lab class at 8:30am on a Monday morning, but that was not entirely the case. After a popular level 3 lab course was cancelled late in the fall, many students scrambled to enroll in another lab class so that program requirements for graduation were met. I learned quickly that most students in the course were there not by choice, but because it was necessary.

As an instructor, selling biostatistics is a challenge, but selling biostatistics to students who are fearful of statistics and have little interest in applying biostatistics in research was a big challenge. However, as we eased into the course, the students embraced the flipped-learning style of teaching, and working with a small group, embarked on an applied research project where they developed their own research questions and used the Odesi Data Portal to answer their questions to bring biostatistics to life.

The final manuscripts have been pulled into a publication to showcase the students’ hard work. Check out the inaugural issue of STATure here.

Please direct your inquiries to: pritcjm@mcmaster.ca