A call for Global Online Fall 2015 Call for Proposals resulted in 43 initial proposals and 6 fully funded projects. We produced the following six new global online education projects from that proposal process:
The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Athens
Sheila Dillon, Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies
Shelia Dillon developed the course “Archeology of Ancient Athens” and used video conferencing to facilitate communication between students at Duke and in Athens. Students at Duke watched videos filmed in Athens to prepare for a spring break trip there. Students at both locations collaborated on end-of-semester projects. Overall, the project was successful and students felt that viewing the videos helped prepare them for the spring break trip to Greece. Shelia found it challenging to involve people in discussions via teleconferencing; it would be helpful for CIT to develop a best practices document or training workshop for faculty who want to use teleconferencing covering:
- How to configure the physical space and location of cameras/microphones in a way that supports collaborative discussion
- How to facilitate discussions to be more interactive conversations and less question-and-answer sessions
- Cultural norms or expectations to consider when facilitating teleconferencing discussions
- Strategies to engage students when discussions lag
Read our blog post on ways we implemented strategies to track student learning in this course.
Infectious Disease Epidemiology in Global Settings
Wendy Prudhomme O’Meara, Steve Taylor and Gayani Tillekeratne, Duke Global Health Institute
Wendy O’Meara proposed continuing to revise a course on infectious disease (Global Health 777) that was initially developed with support from CIT a year previously and offered in the spring of 2016. The course is team taught by three faculty members who are located at sites throughout the world. CIT provided the course team with an evaluation report following the first offering of the course and a brief follow-on report summarizing the revisions. The main conclusions from the follow-on report were:
- In-video questions were added to this iteration of the course and students found them to be very helpful for enhancing their understanding and providing a knowledge check
- Future versions of the course could continue to improve the course videos by adding stated learning objectives for each lessons and summaries at the end of what students should know so they can ensure they have mastered the material.
- Quizzes should focus on higher-order learning (e.g., synthesis of knowledge, application of information to new contexts) rather than only recall of memorized facts.
- Case studies should be assigned reading to complete prior to class; class time should focus on analyzing the case studies and not on actually reading them.
Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
Queen Utley-Smith, Duke University School of Nursing
CIT partnered with Duke University School of Nursing (DUSON) to redesign and implement a cross-cultural perspective to N502: Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, a graduate online course. The online course included students enrolled through Duke in Durham and Duke in China at Duke Kunshan University. The project team proposed a set of recommendations for a more interactive, student-centered, mobile-friendly course that included cross-cultural and global components. Read more about the course in our blog post.
Global Environmental Health Problems: Principles and Case Studies
Junfeng Zhang, Nicholas School of the Environment/Duke Global Health Institute
Jim Zhang proposed an environmental science course as part of the DKU International Master’s in Environmental Policy, the NSOE Master’s in Environmental Management program, and the College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at Peking University. The course was developed and offered in the spring 2017 semester. The course used examples from the U.S., China, and other countries and featured online lecture videos, guest speaker lectures, online discussions, and video or web conferencing. The student feedback indicated that the course was successful.
Global Health Research Design and Methods
Eric Green, Duke Global Health Institute
Eric Green proposed developing an online textbook for global health research methods. He ultimately needed very little CIT support and created an online, interactive textbook that was intended for use in 2 classes; currently it is being used in one class (as of spring 2017). A secondary goal of the project was to demonstrate that a class on global health research methods could be successfully taught online as a prequel to developing a fully online certificate program.
Advanced Global Health Epidemiology
Joseph Egger, Duke Global Health Institute
Joseph Egger developed a set of online resources used to improve a graduate-level Advanced Global Health Epidemiology course and make it possible for the course to be offered online to students at DGHI’s priority locations around the world.