I received my MPH degree with an epidemiology concentration in 2016, so I am not new to the topic. This was an excellent refresher for me regarding the role and history of epidemiology in public health, numeric estimates and data sources, and data visualization. The course also provided an additional skill in Geographical Information Systems. QGIS was a bit challenging to navigate on its own so I will need to go through the training manual and practice. However, I love that this course recommended it since it is free and open source, and it helped me to understand the value of using GIS in epidemiological practice. I would definitely recommend it to epidemiologists that need a recap, as well as to public health practitioners looking to pivot towards epidemiology.

The following are the skills I learned from the course. Thank you for the resource person, the Coursera team as well as the Johns Hopkins University for the scholarship provision for this wonderful and insightful course.

1. How to measure disease occurrence based on numeric measures;

2. How to use appropriate data visualization and how to create data visualization; and

3. How to use the epidemiologic tool in data visualization specifically the QGIS.

I have really enjoyed and benefited immensely from the course.

it has given me more insight into current essential tools in epidemiology and improved my skill in the field of Public Health .

My only challenge with the course was absence of note to serve as reference materials for learning.

Excellent hands on practical exposure to public heath epidemiology aspects covering specially, GIS.

Knowledge gaining, interesting for new beginners to start from the scratch. Thank you for sharing.

Excellent course! Epidemiology is my passion and I realize how much I do not know about this subject and how eager I am to learn so much more!

Thank you John Hopkins for this amazing opportunity!

Very informative and flexible given that I was not able to complete it weekly because of COVID-19 efforts being implemented in the Philippines. Thank you for the opportunity and kind assistance.

The introduction to qGIS was excellent.

Excellent

I really enjoyed the course, the last week on GIS systems and the interactive lesson on how to use QGIS was particularly helpful, as my MPH program did not utilize any interactive GIS tools. However, I found some of the quiz questions to be rather subjective as opposed to clear-cut yes or no answers. Also, it may help to update some of the information reliant on websites, as some of the websites linked have changed a bit and it made following along tricky at times. Nice class, thank you!

Very easy to understand course. Quiz questions challenging so you must pay attention, can't just buzz through the videos without absorbing material. Only area of criticism was instructions to access some of the online features when engaging in the QGIS project were not current. Some of the features of the website and even the QGIS software were a little different from what was depicted in instructions, but minor stumbling block. Overall very good course.

I loved everything except for the QGIS exercise. The barrier to completion of this exercise was insurmountable for me, as the file for practice required a newer computer than I own! I was able to practice a bit with other online QGIS tutorials and as was true for the overall course, I got a better idea regarding where I need to focus future studies.

It was a great course for a beginner, and it was very interactive. As a point of improvement, it was quite challenging to working on the GIS tool, right from downloading it. An update will be much appreciated.

Could be more interactive

This course was a good primer for those who have little or no background in epidemiology and public health. In particular, the instructor set the practice of public health in the context of its longstanding history and the tools that were developed by researchers and government officials to collect population and health data, in order to respond to health issues and threats in a way that traditional, individualized clinical practice was. However, the instructor does not necessarily make the learning objectives clear in each week, and often tests on material that was only vaguely mentioned in the lecture videos or was poorly defined. The last week of the course, on mapping health data with GIS tools, is promising, as it introduces the student to powerful data tools and comprehensive health and geographic data available to the public. However, it falls short in that this segment provides only a cursory treatment of these tools, walking through an exercise that does not reflect the practical usage of such aids and therefore fails to provide the opportunity for students to attain rudimentary skills.

The course was great and had good foundational knowledge of Public Health. However, I struggled with week 4 of the course because it was evident that the course was recorded years before now. There were differences on the interface when practising with the QGIS. I was stuck at different points because some things were different. I resolved to using Google and checking out the discussion forum where I was able to find few answers from students. The sad thing was that none of the questions had answers from the school or tutor. Also, some of the comments were posted years ago, this means that the challenges were not resolved.

Week 4 was an absolute disaster. The instructor has outdated instructions and incomplete instructions for how to use the QGIS software. In addition, despite many complaints about Week 4 in the discussion there has been no change or clarification to the course. The level of complexity introduced during week 4 does not match the type of short introductory course this is either. The QGIS software is very complex and powerful. Having us do a guided tutorial would have worked if the instructions matched up - they don't - so it led to difficulties figuring out the software on our own.

The content was extremely basic. The videos were not engaging, as the lecturer read the slides verbatim with uninteresting intonation. I did learn the basics of using open source GIS mapping software in the last week, but that was the only highlight.

The course material is not up to date with the online tools it talks about. I browse the dataset/website it says in the lecture but they are not the same. It is hard to follow sometimes, specially the QGIS part.

There are problems with the GIS tutorial. Several students have asked questions in the forum which have never been answered, or even acknowledged by Coursera or an instructor.

GIS software installation to its working was time consuming and actually assembling files as guided was not that easy please work on to make it easy

Issues with QGIS lesson, it would be helpful if an instructor gave feedback in the discussion forum

Course was helpful but thought it was a free certification course @ the 7day free trial period

Useful information, but week 4 was very difficult due to outdated information.

Mapping activity wasn't good. Very confusing.

Factfinder has been decommissioned.