PHDA testimonials

"Great instructors with content expertise who are also very accessible for extra support, good class size with diverse classmates, and flexibility that online learning offers."

"I enjoyed the Health Evaluation course (PHDA 06). Although I am familiar with this subject area, I found the concepts were presented in an effective way. Over the 12 weeks, we put together a health evaluation proposal. Work from each weekly module contributed to this final project. I think this was an interesting way to learn about the practical aspects of Health Evaluation."

"I took the Population Health and GIS (PHDA 03) course and loved it! The opportunity to work with GIS technology and expand my skill set in this area was invaluable. It also helped to visualize the outbreak work I had been doing previously, and increase my understanding of what happens in these scenarios.

I plan to focus my work more specifically on infectious diseases, and the GIS skills I learned will be invaluable for visualizing and understanding their impacts more concretely.

There is great support by both the instructor and the course administrators. All of my questions were answered promptly and thoroughly. The coursework was challenging, but manageable for students like me working full time. The assignments were also very engaging, and all had practical applications."

"The course was well structured. Through the course, I learned: a formal approach to developing, structuring and answering a research question using administrative data; how to clearly define the study population; how to develop a flow chart to illustrate, and guide, the development of an analytical dataset; and SAS skills. It was an excellent course and a good refresher for me, as it has been 5 years since I’ve done data analysis. A number of course assignments required me to pair with a fellow student and undergo peer review of one another’s code. It was interesting to see how my peer structured their code to produce their dataset. I enjoyed and learned a lot from this exchange. The flexibility of distance learning meant that it was possible to complete work at my own pace and schedule. It was also helpful to learn from students in different locations, who worked in related fields but had different strengths, skills and perspectives.

Finally, this course gave me experience working with administrative datasets and tools that can be difficult to access on the job. The opportunity to work with samples of real data exposed me to some of the challenges I could face at work in learning, cleaning, formatting and analyzing the data. I would highly recommend this course and the PHDA program to my colleagues. It’s a well-structured and organized program and provides a good theoretical and practical approach to population health data analysis."