Faculty Director’s Foundations for Public Health Course Launches
For future leaders and change agents of public health, this is a sobering and pivotal moment. Around the world today, the health gaps between the best and worst off have widened, demographics and patterns of disease, have changed rapidly, and overlapping public health crises have only become more complex. In public health, the stakes have never been more consequential, and the possibilities also never greater.
Professor Sue J. Goldie in the studio filming a welcome video to the incoming students at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Against this historical backdrop of both challenge and promise, Faculty Director Sue J. Goldie welcomed all incoming students at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health as they commenced their educational journey through her flagship orientation course, Foundations for Public Health.
The genesis for an orientation course prior to the start of formal classes dates back to 2015, when Dean Julio Frenk identified the need for a common public health foundation for all incoming graduate-level students. Dean Frenk partnered with Dr. Goldie, and they worked closely for several months to conceptualize the core curriculum and develop the instructional materials—teaching it together in 2015. Since its inaugural year, the course has been reimagined by Professor Goldie and formally pivoted to an online summer course in 2019 which concludes with an in-person class during orientation week. In subsequent years and throughout the pandemic, Professor Goldie has augmented the course with support of GHELI to better explore core concepts as they relate to rapid changes in public health in the present moment.
Foundations for Public Health leveraged GHELI’s expertise in inclusive, online learning, integrating four modules in the instructional model: fundamental principles of population health, health conditions and epidemiological trends, equity and social determinants of health, and responses from the health and non-health sector. In “plain English,” the course unpacked the “must-knows” for public health professionals—such as the burden of disease and global governance—and explored how students could apply these core concepts to better understand the rapid changes in public health in the present moment. Characteristic of Dr. Goldie’s dynamic and multimodal teaching style, the course’s inclusive virtual environment was supported with interactive “knowledge checks,” sketchnotes, conceptual diagrams, and curated resources from GHELI’s digital repository.
Learn more about the design of Goldie’s flagship orientation course and its evolution across hybrid and virtual environments.