Great Course!

Comprehensive

Great Course

great course

Really good

it is good

i love it

Loved it!

very well

very good

excellent

Amazing!

great!

great

good

GOOD

good

Nice

G

R

I liked the course, with its many different speakers and approaches.

The one thing I missed the most was seeing the models in action. Even if the course isn't aimed at scientists or programmers, there are free online simulations where one can adjust model constants to see the effects interactively without any knowledge required.

See NetLogo at http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/, for which there are forest fire, disease spread in networks, cellular automatas and many other interactive simulations. Insight providing questions may involve finding the value of a parameter such as the epidemic can't spread, for instance.

For more formula oriented optional exercises, I would recommend something similar to Differential Equations in Action from Udacity. It's a relatively easy course implementing the SIR model, physics and ABS. An exercise could be "modify the simulation to consider X% germs get resistant after each antibiotic treatment" (either in NetLogo, or Python).

Ideally I would have liked a bit more maths, having obtained a textbook by the lead academic in this course, but nevertheless I have learned good background information regarding the subject. Having the virus at present allows this information to be put into practice. However I do believe, that the course could be 'tidied' up. The transcripts of the lectures have been used for a few years. They have some errors and it would be more professional if they had been corrected by now. Some of the links are dysfunctional. These should be checked and adjusted accordingly.

This course was a good introduction to Epidemics. I feel that I have a good grasp of the complex nature of this field of study, and the different factors that can play a part in epidemiological outcomes. I would have liked have been exposed to more of the modelling methods in the field, but SIR model was a good introduction and allowed me to look further into agent and individual based models and I have a good enough understanding of the jargon to follow scientific papers on the modelling of infectious diseases.

Year of COVID19. This course helped explain how disease, pathogens, treatments, cultural attitudes, and global collaboration work. Spurred more of an interest in this field of study. Professors articulated the information well, but I did have to follow the transcripts from time to time; though those were incorrect a few times too. A great course, I look forward to an update, considering they talked about the "Ebola epidemic" from 2014 in the Q&A at the end.

The material is a few years old now, and it will presumably get revamped in the light of Covid-19 - once the academics have more time on their hands - but I still found it useful. Many of the links to reading material on the web were now broken.

The course is not very taxing, and you will pass the quizzes quite quickly just by watching the lectures. However, it doesn't take up too much of your day, and you learn basic vocabulary and concepts.