[ Background music ]
>> So this course, for example, is a course that's capped
at 33 students because they end up working in teams of 3
to study 11 countries.
The beginning of the class what we do is choose the 11 countries
and they have to be from low-, middle-
and high-income countries across the world so it's comparative,
but the US is the only one that we can't do
but we do all others, and we look at four core content areas;
health care financing and organization,
health care workforce, socioeconomic conditions
of the country for health and health care
and then also we apply it to one disease area,
treatment of HIV-AIDS.
Okay, I'm going to just first talk through very briefly
about how what we do in the class fits this kind of model.
So, step one first week we're going
to do health care financing and organization.
They have a set of readings they have to do,
they do those readings outside of classroom,
we come to the classroom we talk about them,
I might lecture some, we have discussion, and I'm going
to show you in a few minutes the way we might do that.
In this case, we use technology.
We can do it with technology through an online setting.
The best part of the class, the thing the students
like the most is step two,
which is when they work in their teams.
Now these teams are very highly structured.
They have very specific content that they need to produce each
of those four areas and so they work with their teams
to study their country, gather data for, you know,
week two they're working on health care financing
and organization and then they present their work to the class.
So, they become very skilled in their one country case
and then they listen to and learn from the other students
in the class for the other ten countries.
The teams are also structured in that they have the opportunity
to evaluate one another, they have incentives to pay attention
to the other teams who are presenting because they're going
to need to understand the material that comes
from all the different reports from their peers
and their peers actually evaluate them
in their presentation on a variety of things;
on the content, on the presentation,
somewhat on their slides whether their slide is too busy, too,
you know, those kind of things.
So they're learning lots of different skills.
When they get evaluated, they get back
from me not only my evaluation of their country report
on health care financing and organization
and their presentation, they also get their evaluations
from the class compared to what the class mean
on the presentations are.
So they're getting multiple forms
of feedback among themselves and across the class.
In a class like this, the faculty member,
I feel like a manager almost more than a teacher
because what I have to do is structure the content.
I need to help focus them.
They can't just go out and do, find out anything they want
about the health care system of Brazil.
No, they need to find out how is it organized,
how is it financed, what percentage of the system comes
from government funds, from private insurance,
do they have insurance, how is it organized?
They have very specific questions
and I hope the groups work together, I give them the tools
to help them work as a team;
they're not just left on their own.
So, they at the end get to evaluate each other.
So if somebody, you know,
if Board of Supervisors is not pulling his weight,
we get a chance to say that because students really hate it
when there's a slacker in the group who isn't,
doesn't get identified but they also it's surprising,
maybe not so surprising how often they will also say someone
else in the group did a great job.
They did more work than we did.
They should get extra credit.
So, it's a way for them to really evaluate each other
and they know that that's in there as a safety valve
if somebody isn't pulling their weight
and they I think really start to pay attention to things,
their own behavior hopefully, but they notice things
that really worked well and I'm going
to now try to use that myself.
So it's a way to get them to pay attention and learn
from each other as much as from the content that I deliver.
The third step is that at the end of the week of presentations
for each of the core areas they have I used
to call it a take-home quiz, but students really hate the word
"quiz" so now I call them papers, short papers, right?
Where they now have to analyze and synthesize across all
of these countries and usually they have to have some question
that requires them to go back to those facts and theories
that we talked about at first and that needs
to present evidence from at least four of the countries
that they heard about, they know their own in depth
and now they have to have paid attention
to what their peers have taught them and they need
to then synthesize that for me to evaluate
and that's a tool not just for them
to synthesize their knowledge but it's also a tool for me
to know how well did they really get some of these points?
Did they miss something?
Do I need to go back and make sure
that I cover something in particular.
Now I want to give you a little flavor for what we actually do
in the class and how we use, for example, the technology
that you have that might help in either that earliest stage
in knowledge and comprehension.
So, for example, one of the weeks we're going to be talking
about the global distribution of health and health care.
So, you're at a disadvantage.
You did not do the first week's assigned reading but I'm going
to still ask you the question.
So, I can evaluate how well they've done the reading
and even use this then as a tool for discussion by saying low-
and middle-income countries in the world comprise 84%
of the world's population what percent
of the disease burden do low-
and middle-income countries account for?
So, if you think about the burden of disease
in the world being 100%, what percent of the burden
of disease is in low- and middle-income countries?
If you think it's proportional, you might just think it's 84%
because that's the 84% of the population.
So, you can choose your response on the clicker in front of you
and it's anonymous so I don't know
so don't be afraid of making a mistake.
I can then use these, these are just on facts.
It's just a way to try to get even into the reading
but then I can use it to say, okay,
now that we know those figures we can talk about this slide,
which compares high-income, low-income countries,
this is from the World Health Organization,
and it compares death by cause
of death 2004 projected 2015 projected 2030.
So another way we can use this kind of technology and try
to think about how we might convey that knowledge
and comprehension step in the higher-order thinking is
in the social sciences we often talk about value-laden ideas
and things that can be controversial.
This one isn't all that controversial,
but there's definitely disagreements.
Is health care a human right?
What do you think about that?
Some people may feel uncomfortable saying I'm not
sure health care is the human right especially in the class
of global health systems at Dartmouth College where most
of the people in the class are here to, you know,
go out and end suffering throughout the world,
but we want to have some of that conversation.
How do we enable those difficult discussions
and how might we motivate that?
We might want to talk about other controversial issues
in all kinds of classes.
So, this is a way that students can share an opinion.
Maybe they want to even do it just as a devil's advocate
so that we have a conversation and so tools
like this technology also enable us to technology
in a way we've always talked about these issues
in the social sciences and throughout Dartmouth
across fields, but this is a sort of tool that helps us do it
in a way somewhat different way.
I can tell you with this class the thing the students remember
most is step two really where they're working in teams
and where they are coming up with, they're learning
about their countries.
So it is designing the class, thinking about the goals
of the class, which is what we learned from resources
at Dartmouth like DCal thinking
about what are the goals of the class?
Yes, they need to learn about global health systems
in general; what are the features of health care systems
and how do we find them and how are they organized?
We want to learn some things about developing middle-income
and high-income countries and a variety of systems out there
and we want them to really be able to do some comparison
to evaluate and understand the big picture
and the individual case.
So that's an example.
Not all social science department or classes do,
you know, pedagogy this way.
The curriculum is distributed across different types
of classes and certainly every department has classes
that offer it like this, but in the social sciences
and I think we have really perfected this at Dartmouth,
we can do cutting edge research, we can be the top scholars
in our fields in the social sciences, in the arts
and humanities without graduate students.
That is not in any way a reflection
on where the graduate students are.
That's really important for not just the research
but that's an important part of the pedagogy
in lots of departments.
Having a graduate student in the lab is different
from having a faculty member in the lab
and there's real value there.
We're used to kind of talking about it
that the graduate students are somehow not good
for the undergrads, they are.
I mentioned to the last group we had a, we're doing a search
in sociology for assistant professor right now,
lowest level, and we just, you know,
I won't share the university at this time,
a major state university who sent an email
and said would you consider a tenured faculty in the pool
because I'd give anything to come to Dartmouth.
This is a place where they've got graduate, you know,
that 10 years ago, that I didn't, we didn't hear
that because you would say why would you ever go to a place
without graduate students?
Well, now they can see the scholarship,
the research productivity steps
up against the best universities.
We can do our research without graduate students.
The benefits of smallness are
that you look outside your department.
So, of course, we are colleagues with economics and government
and the other social sciences and I work
with computer science, I work with the economists,
I work with TBI, right?
You are almost forced, it doesn't mean everyone should do
that or everybody is multidisciplinary,
but you are forced to find the connections, you know,
I work with Mark Williams over in Film and Television Studies.
You figure out I actually have a lot more in common
or I have something in common with that group over there,
work with people at Tuck, right?
When I'm surrounded by five other people who work
in my same field, well, my gosh, I just walk down the hall
and talk to them and, of course, I love my colleagues a lot
but the benefits of smallness are
that it enables collaboration in a way
that I don't think is possible at the big places.
It's actually more difficult in those places.
[ Background music ]