17 The Live Course
This book is free and self-paced. It is also taught live, in small cohorts, as two courses of two-hour evening sessions.
The difference is not the material. It is that in a cohort you type the code while someone watches for the place you are about to get stuck, you argue about the duplicate subject with three other people instead of reading what I concluded, and you have a deadline.
17.1 The two courses
| Course A: SDTM | Course B: ADaM and Outputs | |
|---|---|---|
| Evenings | 7 | 8 |
| Total | 14 hours | 16 hours |
| You build | dm, ae, lb, vs, define.xml |
adsl, adae, adlb, TLFs, ADRG, Dataset-JSON |
| Prerequisite | Setup only | Course A or equivalent |
Course A stands on its own. You can stop after it having built a real SDTM and a valid Define-XML document, which is a complete piece of work.
Course B assumes it. Together they run about 30 hours of live teaching across fifteen weeks, plus roughly an hour a week between sessions.
17.2 Who this works for
The same people the book is for: R users who can write dplyr but have never seen a submission, academics moving into pharma, statisticians who have been told to learn CDISC. No prior CDISC knowledge, no clinical trials background beyond knowing roughly what a randomised trial is.
It works less well if you cannot commit to typing along. The sessions are built around running code, not watching it.
17.3 How it runs
- Two hours, one evening a week, with a ten-minute break
- Small, so that everyone can be heard and nobody hides
- Not recorded, so discussion is open. This is deliberate, and it has a cost: see the note on each course page about missing an evening
- Code-along, with short group challenges and a discussion in every session
- Homework between evenings, about an hour, reviewed at the start of the next session
- Questions between evenings go to GitHub Discussions, which is also where setup problems get sorted out in week one and where anything announced between sessions is posted
17.4 What you need
- A laptop you can install software on
- R, RStudio and Quarto, set up per Before You Begin before the first evening
- Willingness to be wrong in front of four other people in a breakout room, which is where most of the learning happens
17.5 If you are reading this on your own
Everything the cohort works through is in this book, in order, with every code chunk executed against data that ships with the repository. The two schedule pages double as a self-paced study plan: work one session a week, do the homework exercise, and you will cover the same ground on the same timescale.
What you will not get on your own is the argument. That is the part worth paying for.