Interdisciplinary Research In Public Health

Reeves explains that university in-person enrollment across the country was down before the pandemic. “When the pandemic hit, it created a perfect storm to tank a lot of enrollment numbers,” she says. Many programs were forced to move their in-person course content to a completely online format. “A lot of programs just took their in-person offerings and recorded their lectures (sometimes with suboptimal audio and visual) and pushed it out with minimal changes to the curriculum,” notes Reeves. “There has been a decrease in online program use over the past couple of years because the quality of online education has been questionable and inconsistent.” The silver lining is that the pandemic created an ideal opportunity to learn how to provide more flexibility in educational offerings. The HCOPH is working to rethink the existing curriculum to make it more interactive for students, increase educational outcomes and offer new opportunities for students to engage with materials. “We’ve created online education workshops for faculty to help them learn best practices for teaching in an online environment as well as provided tips and tricks on the practical application of producing online lectures,” says Reeves.

For now, the college is focusing on its MPH program. “At the moment, we are exploring other programs’ viability for online. We have a few current applications which are going through the approval process at the university,” says Reeves. “It's an exciting time to expand the learning opportunities for students.”