The Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health likes to think big,
and globally. The school is, after all, in the business of
saving millions at a time.
So when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
invited the Bloomberg School to join a consortium of
institutions that makes course content available for free
to everyone via the Web, it was of little surprise that the
school signed on.
Today, in addition to the hundreds of degree-seeking
students who come to Baltimore each year to enroll in such
classes as Refugee Health Care and Biostatistics, millions
around the globe can now view the content of those and
other courses through the School of Public Health's
OpenCourseWare site.
The site, launched in 2004, provides access to the
content — syllabus, videos, reading lists, lecture
notes, homework assignments, etc. — of the school's
most popular courses. In support of the famous celluloid
axiom "build it and they will come," hundreds of thousands
of people from around the globe have already dropped in to
take a look at what the school has to offer. In just one
recent month, the site registered more than 124,000 visits
from those in the United States, Taiwan, the United
Kingdom, Turkey, Singapore, Germany and elsewhere.
This month, Social and Behavioral Aspects of Public
Health became the 46th course published on the site, and
plans are to double that number within the next few
years.
The OpenCourseWare project began at MIT in 2002, and
today more than 120 higher education institutions in 16
countries belong to the OpenCourseWare Consortium, whose
mission is to advance education and empower people
worldwide through free online course content.
James Yager, senior associate dean for academic
affairs and the Edyth H. Schoenrich Professor in Preventive
Medicine at the School of Public Health, said that
OpenCourseWare fits in perfectly with the school's mission
and was a logical addition to its distance-learning
offerings.
"Public Health is about improving the health and lives
of people throughout the world, and we do that through the
translational research conducted by our faculty, students
and staff, whether they be in nutrition, infectious
diseases or another field. But another part of our mission
is the dissemination of that knowledge, to make our
knowledge as widely available as possible," said Yager, who
oversees the OCW effort at the school. "That is what we are
doing here with our OpenCourseWare program."
OpenCourseWare pages offer a "snapshot" of the course,
including a description of the subject and noncopyrighted
materials such as quizzes, slide presentations and lecture
notes. The pages are a one-way street, however. The user
cannot interact directly with the professor of the course
or its students, and, unlike other virtual learning
environments, there are no discussion boards or other
interactive elements.
Yager said that the School of Public Health's OCW
program is not meant to replace degree-granting higher
education or for-credit courses but to provide, at no cost,
the content that supports an education.
"The distinction to make here is that this is content,
not a course," he said. "This is not at all meant to
replace a college education, which involves interaction
with faculty and other students as part of the total
experience."
Yager said that the visitors to the site have been
former Johns Hopkins students who live abroad, students and
faculty at other schools and self-learners with at least a
passing interest in the subjects.
Through testimonials submitted via the site, the
school has learned that faculty at other schools have used
the online materials to help develop their own courses, and
students have used the content to assist them with their
own studies or to be inspired to take more public health
courses.
Users do not need to register on the site but are only
asked to accept conditions of use and complete an optional
survey.
The site's most popular pages of late have been
History of Public Health, Biostatistics, Statistical
Reasoning I, Psychiatric Epidemiology and Understanding
Cost-Effectiveness. The list of recently added classes
includes Health Across the Life Span; Radiation Terror 101;
Impact of Pandemic Influenza on Public Health; and
Nutritional Health, Food Production and the Environment.
Yager said that prior to the OCW site's launch, many
School of Public Health faculty had already developed
online versions of their courses in support of the
part-time Internet-based MPH program, making the
implementation of the program relatively smooth.
Participation in the program is voluntary. If a
faculty member wants to place the content of a course on
the site, Yager said, he or she can work with the school's
Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology to do
so.
Many of the school's faculty have embraced the OCW
program and the opportunity to make their work available to
the masses.
Karl Broman, an associate professor in the Department
of Biostatistics, who posted the content of his Statistics
for Laboratory Scientists I course on the OCW site, said,
"I'm a big believer in making everything public that comes
out of the university. I view it as my role as a faculty
member here to help everyone, everywhere."
Yager said that the school makes participating faculty
aware of the hits to their pages and any testimonials that
mention their courses.
In selling the site to faculty, Yager said he likes to
point out that, through OCW, a person's course content and
knowledge can reach a worldwide audience more quickly and
easily than any textbook can. And the cost to the user
couldn't be cheaper.
For more information about OCW, go to
ocw.jhsph.edu. For a
complete list of participating institutions in the OCW
Consortium, go to
www.ocwconsortium.org.
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