¡e our course as a 
materials avail- 
follows: To pro- 
■dge, theory, and 
yzing and inter- 
various diseases 
ng exposure pro 
ved patterns. The 
ected to have a 
1th, and recruit- 
ipecially targets 
>lic Health. This 
rom the depart- 
ipidemiology, at 
i Masters level, 
e had introduc- 
have some basic 
xercise certain 
■s, including one 
, a product soon 
id especially the 
5 project (which 
st piece of soft- 
one for much of 
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these pieces of 
¡signed for per- 
sts. The course 
i test the soft- 
t from the stu- 
le software can 
r e have 24 hours 
wo-hour blocks 
ves, along with 
in in two-hour 
sic ideas: 
al concepts (1 
session) 
• GIS, Spatial Data, and Exploratory tech 
niques (2) 
• Surveillance (1) 
• Basic spatial statistics (2) 
• Designer spatial statistics (1) 
• Modelling (Hierarchical, Geostatistical and 
Compartmental) (2) 
• Elucidating process from pattern (3) 
These topics served as the basis for the lec 
tures in our first go-round, and the lectures 
(and associated labs) were then converted into 
the series of modules already described. 
The course runs for 14 weeks, which allows us 
to use a week or two at the end of the course 
for exams and presentations of projects which 
the students carry out in consultation with 
the instructors. These presentations are an in 
tegral part of the course, as they represent the 
ability of the students to apply the concepts 
which we study throughout the course. As the 
course continues more and more presentations 
will be available from the web site, providing 
helpful guidence in the construction of others’ 
analyses. 
5.3 The Labs 
The labs are designed to implement ideas from 
lecture using software available to University 
of Michigan students. In fact, however, all 
the software used (with the exception of Ar- 
cView) is available to everyone (either because 
it is public-domain, a demo version exists, or 
a time-limited executable is available). Thus, 
the labs have some utility even if the user does 
not currently own the software. 
Two operating systems are used in class: Win 
dows, and UNIX. Those without access to 
UNIX will not be unduly limited, however, 
as products exist permitting one to do sim 
ilar things in Windows. For example, the geo 
statistics lab comes in two flavors: one utiliz 
ing Geo-EAS (a public-domain UNIX prod 
uct), and the other utilizing GS+ (a Windows 
product): either will get the general ideas 
across. Consider another example: while we 
use xv (a UNIX utility) to do our image file 
conversion, many other packages exist under 
Windows to do the same kinds of image con 
version. 
The labs are perhaps the major strength of 
our site: with some patience and time a user 
can generally proceed through them on his or 
her own. They complement the lecture top 
ics, and give the student some hands-on ex 
posure to applications of the ideas treated in 
the modules. 
5.4 Lecture and Lab Issues 
We present many different software packages 
for dealing with the quite vast array of tech 
niques studied in the course: the web (to 
start), followed by ArcView for GIS, xgobi for 
ESDA, GS+ for geostatistics, Stella for com 
partmental models, Stat! for spatial statistics, 
Gamma for designer statistics, UNIX, ftp, tel 
net, XWindows, etc. 
Students have said that only three software 
packages are essential to the course: ArcView, 
Stat!, and Gamma; furthermore, they almost 
unanimously agreed that they would prefer 
to do more with fewer, rather then less with 
more packages. Thus, as we prepare to run our 
course for a second time we plan on reducing 
the number of concepts introduced in lecture 
while discussing them in greater depth, with 
a consequent reduction in the lateral software 
demands of the course, and an increase in the 
range of treatment of a few selected pieces of 
software. 
In spite of our sea change, all modules remain 
on-line and available for the students whether 
presented in our formal course or not. For ex 
ample, if a student needs to understand as 
pects of geostatistics for a class project, that 
module may be studied on that student’s own 
time (with some guidence, perhaps, from the 
teacher). As students needs expand beyond 
the current availability of modules, new mod 
ules will be created (perhaps by the students 
themselves!). 
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