Hello. My name is Sharon McCann. As the course director,
I would like to provide you with a personal introduction to this M.S. in evidence based health care that we run out of Oxford University,
this MSA attracts busy health care,
research and management professionals from across the world who are interested in developing and challenging their practice.
The focus of this MSE is to encourage you to identify the best quality research,
read it critically, and be confident about how and why you apply it in your practice.
So as a whole, the MSA is a modular and part time course where we require you to complete six modules and a dissertation.
Most students do this over 2 to 4 years.
You do not need to be an Oxford to do this, although you may choose to come here and stay for longer than the modules require you to.
So when I talk about six modules, I'm talking about six courses of study,
only two of which are compulsory, though the compulsory modules are more introductory in nature.
So one is titled The Practice of Evidence Based Health Care,
which is very general and gives you an overview of a lot of the different topics and areas of evidence based health care.
And the second compulsory module takes you a little bit deeper into the study designs and research methods that
you'll need to understand to get to grips with the health care research that is most common at the moment.
Then you will have a choice from at least ten different modules to do four modules that are particularly of interest to you.
Now, when I talk about a module,
what I'm talking about is a period of study which is focussed around one week of face to face classroom activities in Oxford.
Normally you'll be here from Monday to Friday and we run classes of between 16 or 25 students.
We intersperse the teaching with a range of formal lectures from academics and researchers
who are active in the area at the moment with small group and general discussions.
Occasionally you'll be put in groups and asked to do specific projects or specific pieces of work.
Some modules will encourage you to prepare for a presentation which you give to your colleagues at the end of the week.
And the learning that you do in these modules is very active.
You're learning from experts in the area. You're also learning from your colleagues,
some of whom will have a lot of experience in these areas and others who are going to be learning from the beginning.
Now, this learning continues through the week in Oxford, and we use a virtual learning environment, a platform called Web.
Learn to offer you the opportunity to continue online discussions beyond the Oxford Week.
We'll pose some questions that will help you dig deeper into the assignment topic, and you'll be encouraged to post questions,
critique each other's questions, and just continue that collegial learning environment.
Normally, about six or seven weeks after the Oxford Week, we'll ask you to submit an an assignment online.
Now, that assignment is often going to be a topic and an area that is of interest to you so that you can design this MSE to
actually develop your knowledge and your practice in certain specific areas that are really unique to your current workload.
So if we fast track a few years where you've done six modules, you'll be ready to then enrol in the dissertation.
The dissertation is usually something that we think about taking place over a year.
Part time. We're assigned you a supervisor who has some content or methodological expertise in the topic that you want to investigate.
You might want to complete a systematic review on an area.
You might want to write an in-depth protocol of a of a trial that you need to do.
Or you might want to do a piece of methodological or qualitative research that you'll be supervised often at a distance over that year,
and you'll be encouraged to submit your dissertation by September of that academic year.
So I hope that's given you a bit of an overview of the messy and a bit of a flavour of how the learning takes place.
Please continue to search this website for the details that you need and do feel free to contact us directly for any more information.
Thanks for your time.