 Hello everybody, it's great to see so many of you joining us today and thanks to those few who've introduced yourselves in the chat and asked some questions already. My name is Sinead Whitty, I'm the acting course director for the brand new postgraduate diploma in global health research here at the University of Oxford. So I'm delighted to introduce the course to you today. And this is a little outline of what I'll talk you through. So the program is fully online, so we'll take some time to outline exactly how that will work and how it will feel for you as a student and various other details as well. So please do keep the questions coming as I'm talking through. So the postgraduate diploma itself takes 14 months to complete. It's taught over four terms. As you can see there on screen each term has a particular focus from research design, data management and analysis, quality systems and finally research implementation. So the course is designed for all people involved in health research. Whatever the disease area is that you're interested in and whatever your particular role is within the research team, we really do want to cohort that's geographically and demographically representative and that also encompasses the depth and breadth of any well-functioning research team. So taking this course will really help you understand how to run an ethically framed high quality research study, particularly within the context of a low resource setting. So the course is unique on a number of fronts. It is the University of Oxford's first award bearing course that has been designed to be delivered fully online. And uniquely there is no requirement for you to travel to Oxford at any point. So you don't need to worry about visas or taking a break from your career or leaving your family or moving your family. And we hope that this flexibility will make the course very excuse me, very approachable for a lot of people and will give you the flexibility to actually take up your place on it. So at every level we have designed the programme itself with really busy professionals in mind. So you will see as we go through all the flexibility that is designed in and all the practical elements as well. So this is really a very practically focused course. And while you take this balance your study with your professional and personal commitments, you will enjoy the Oxford experience fully online. And when we talk about the Oxford experience, what we mean really is very student centred and really supportive environment in which you learn to the best of your abilities. And we talk more about that as we go through. Excuse me. So we believe as well that the content of the course also adds to its uniqueness. We begin by asking what is health research and then we work all the way through finishing up with how to convert your research into practice. So I just want to take a moment to outline how we created the curriculum because that as well was a very novel approach. It is actually a crowdsourced curriculum. Colleagues at the Global Health Network here at the University of Oxford together with colleagues from TDR conducted a huge piece of research. To find out really what were the essential skills that anybody involved in research needed to have. We had over 7000 respondents to that Delphi process. As you can see from the map on the left of the screen, the majority of the respondents were researchers from LMICs. We also had substantial input from stakeholder organisations such as EDCTP, the European Commission, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and so on. So that gave us the essential research skills curriculum, which you see in the centre. And we took those topics and further mapped them against the Global Health Network and TDR's competency framework that you see on the right. And that is what has given us the curriculum for the postgraduate diploma. So when we looked at all the topics that we had, they naturally fell into those four teaching terms that I outlined briefly earlier. And they've also naturally fallen into the sections that give us our main course learning outcomes. So to design and implement high quality and ethical research, to translate that into new policies, best practices or maybe medicinal products and to effectively manage data right throughout its life cycle and to practice research always being mindful of its potential societal impact. So in terms of course content and how it works, we study four particular modules in each term. So there are eight teaching weeks in a term. What happens is, say in term one for research design, you'll study what is health research at the same time as outcome measures and protocol design. So you study those two subjects for the first four weeks and in the second four weeks we move on then to ethics and community engagement. And that's how it works right the way through. So how does a typical week look? How does it feel? What's the structure? So if you can see on screen here, we start at the top with the purple circle. So we have an interactive pre-recorded lecture and when we say interactive, what we mean is that you interact with human beings on it. So you can click on any part of the lecture and leave a message for your teachers, for your classmates and your teachers and classmates will respond to you there. This is really helpful for us because the teaching team can understand where you're stuck, what you don't completely understand and also what you're really interested in. So it's a great way to share your experience and expertise right at the start of the week. And we follow that up with some real-world tasks and that really helps you to put the theory into practice, particularly bearing in mind the context in which you're working. Those tasks are reported onto discussion forums that the whole class can see. So we all learn from each other and the discussion continues. Now what happens is on those discussion forums, your teachers will come in and they will give you feedback so that you're really clear on what you're doing well and also what you need to do to improve. So maybe we'll invite other class members to build on an answer that you have started, for example. So it's all really supportive with the idea of helping everybody to learn to the best of your ability and also to share your expertise and to share your questions because that's really important too. In the middle of the week then we come together for a live class which would be on Zoom or similar. And this is not a lecture because we've already had that right at the start of the week. So in the live class we take time to talk about those parts of the lecture that were a bit tricky, that might need a bit more explanation and also to delve into the parts of this week's topic that are most of interest and relevance to you. So it's a really dynamic, lovely part of the week to come together live. That's followed up then by an individual guided reflection where you will write up a really short note on what you learned, why it's important to you and what are you going to do with this new knowledge or skills that you've gained this week. And it could be that you've realised that actually at your site you're already implementing best practice and that's a wonderful thing to realise and to share that with your own team at work. So that's a lovely thing to pop into your reflection or it could be that maybe you want to implement some change in your workplace and you're not really sure of who you might need to bring on board to support you in that, who you might need to have on a team in order to make sure it's successful. So you can talk out those particular questions with your own personal tutor and you get one-to-one feedback on that guided reflection. Now I'll talk in a moment about the assessment and when I do those real-world tasks and the guided reflection are going to come up again so just bear those in mind. So naturally the week doesn't look all circularly, it looks a bit like this. So we use Canvas which is the University of Oxford's online learning platform. So this is our classroom, it's where we meet, it's where you find absolutely everything you need and the design is really simple. You start at the top of the page and you work the way down so you can't get lost, you can't forget anything. Canvas is available as an app that's free to use so you can work on the go if you like. As much as possible the content will be downloadable so you can also have the flexibility to work offline and absolutely everything you need is here including additional resources which might be books, journal articles, videos or podcasts and you will also have full access to the University's libraries online of course. On screen here you have the beautiful and ancient Bodleian Library on the right hand side and it's next to our neighbour the Radcliffe camera to the left. These are just two of the 100 libraries that make up the Bodleian Libraries group and together they offer you access online to 1.4 million e-books, 118,000 e-journals and over 1,300 databases. So if you can't find what you're looking for here I don't know where you'll find it so it'll be extremely well prepared for your learning and for your assessment as well. So we have one assessment per term. The design is that you do a little bit every week so you never actually have a crunch point where all your essays are due or anything like that and again this is part of the design because you will be working at the same time as studying so we really want to support you through the assessment. So what happens is we come together at the first week of term we announce the assessment details you will be put into assessment teams and you will have a team tutor who will help you form as a team and decide how you're going to work together. Now you'll have a private group space on Canvas that you're free to use but a lot of groups like to use WhatsApp or something like that just for really quick informal communication and that's absolutely fine. And then at a roundabout the midpoint in the term as a team you will submit the first draft of one section of your team assessment and you will get formative feedback on that so that means you don't get a percentage or a letter grade what you get is a roadmap to your continued success so the feedback will tell you what you're doing well and what you need to do to improve. So you should have a very clear path forward then in terms of guiding the work that you do for the rest of the term on your team assessment. Then in week 10 that's assessment week which for us is celebration week so the team assessment is a live presentation the whole class is there and everybody learns from the work that you've done you will have worked really hard to create your team assessment so we hope that you'll enjoy sharing that with the whole class and being really proud of it. Following the presentation then we'll have a few minutes for questions and answers with the assessment team and also then there's an individual element to assessment so if you remember those reflective pieces that you will have written every week what you can do is bundle those up put them in context of the overall term and submit that along with a note that outlines what was your contribution to the team assessment and what you learned from that. So what you'll find actually is that in addition to learning theory and how you might put that into practice in your own particular context you'll actually be developing a host of really valuable and really important transferable skills so everything from critical thinking interpersonal skills those advocacy communication skills academic writing skills and so on these are highly valued by employers across the globe regardless of the role that you have within your own team at work. So really what's hugely important to your success and to your enjoyment of the whole process of studying online with us is the support that we have for you as students because the reality might be like the picture on the top of the screen here that you will sit down at your own computer on your own at the start or the end of your working day and you'll be working away on your coursework but it should actually feel like the picture on the bottom that you're really embedded in this hugely supportive friendly team where everyone's there to help each other out and you have all the support from the academic and admin teams through the formative feedback that you get every week your individual tutor is there for you your assessment team tutor is there for you but the most important thing really is that your classmates are there for you and it's those connections that you're going to make with the peers in your class that are going to help you through on those weeks when you're a bit stressed at work maybe you've pressured at home maybe you're not feeling so well having those good strong social networks are really really important so we help you form those as well at every point so that's a brief outline of the course how it works online I hope by this stage you're somewhat interested in applying the entry requirements are on screen here if you have a degree in one of the four areas that's listed that's terrific you can use that to meet the entry requirements if your degree is in a different area or if you don't have a degree but you do have at least three years relevant work experience you can use that to meet the entry requirements so do please email the course if you have any questions about your own eligibility for it the links will be in the chat there thank you very much Lauren for popping those in just to say there is an application fee of £75 that's standard across the university for any course there are some waivers for people from low-income countries again if you're wondering if you fit in that category send us an email and we'll advise you you do need to submit some paperwork so what I'd suggest is if you're interested begin your application process straight away you can add to it over time and what happens is we shortlist candidates and we interview everybody on the shortlist and then we'll follow up with you to offer you a place all going well just to say that there is a fee for the course as well this year it's £12,880 I do appreciate that's a substantial amount of money for anybody to get together there are some bursaries available so please don't let the course fee put you off from applying and again do email us if you've you know particular questions about your own individual circumstances we'd be delighted to hear from you and I suppose really as much as we're really proud of the course that we've created and how special it is how special the University of Oxford is what really makes the university special and I think you will have gotten this idea very clearly from Prashista's talk as well is the people that's what really matters and so on screen here we have a number of Oxford people past and present I mean we could add loads more names to it and we'd love to add yours so will you join us so thank you very much everybody we look forward now to hearing your questions in the Q&A or maybe some of them are in the chat but that's everything from me and thank you so much