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Rethinking Foundations for Public Health

Since 2015, incoming T.H. Chan School of Public Health students have been introduced to public health through an orientation course originally conceptualized, developed, and taught by former Dean Julio Frenk and Dr. Sue J. Goldie. The course aims to establish a solid foundation for graduate students' education, experiences, and engagements over the academic year. 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 to better explore core concepts as they relate to rapid changes in public health in the present moment.

Learn more about the course design and Professor Goldie’s approach to teaching an online foundational course in this featured news story. 

Visual Tools and Techniques

Over the years, students have expressed interest in learning more about how the course was designed, the techniques behind pedagogical choices, visual learning, and multimedia approaches, and how to develop and apply creative methodologies to their learning and professional experiences. We developed a Teaching Toolkit: Visual Tools and Techniques, which contains seven individually-curated guides. It includes tailored resources and tips for data visualization, “drawing to learn” techniques, design elements, images, and icons, word clouds, and infographics, “mind mapping” techniques, taking sketch notes, and a collection of recommended and low-cost sketch supplies.

Creating an Inclusive Virtual Environment and Integrating COVID-19 During the Pandemic

In order to incorporate the current public health crisis of COVID-19 into her teaching, Professor Goldie created an optional Zoonotic Infection and Pandemic Risk module to augment the core concepts taught in previous lessons. This lesson in a four part series on Coronavirus 101 reviews how COVID-19 makes people sick and asks students to consider how different mechanisms of transmission will affect policy decisions and public health interventions.

In addition, video lessons were supported with interactive quizzes or “knowledge checks,” sketch-notes of the drawings to promote conceptual understanding, and curated resources from GHELI’S digital repository. Watch this overview video as Professor Goldie navigates an online tutorial of the COVID-19 Teaching Toolkit which includes ten individual collections curated to support teaching and learning about the pandemic.