Created accessible, engaging learning materials
for public health professionals out in the field
that they could fit in around their busy
lives to build their skills in public health
social marketing and ethical programming
to address childhood obesity and weight stigma.
With the Strategic Training Initiative
for the Prevention of Eating Disorders,
we have a case method creation program
where we develop curriculum materials that
can be used in public health classrooms around the country
or around the globe to bring in topical, cutting edge issues
and eating disorders prevention into public health classrooms.
We'd created, I think, eight teaching cases
for traditional in-person classrooms.
Very excited about that.
We're a great body of work.
Never been done before, anything like that.
And then we realized, how many people can we possibly reach
if we stay limited to traditional in-person
implementation, teaching in a traditional classroom?
How many people who are public health practitioners
can get back into a college or university classroom?
They don't have time.
They're working on the field.
They need the education to come to them.
They need training opportunities to come to them,
to meet them where they're at.
Whether they're working on this before work,
after work, on weekends, on vacations,
we need to give them something that they can really integrate
into their busy working lives.
Some of the key design elements that we need to figure out
is, how do we capture the experimentation and the energy
of case method teaching and active learning
in an in-person classroom where you can see your classmates
work together?
You can build off each other's energy.
How do we capture that and bring that into a digital platform
where they are not face-to-face in a literal sense?
They're not in the same classroom
with their classmates on this.
But we still want to capture that energy, that engagement,
and that spirit of experimentation.
And to being able to work really collaboratively together,
even though they're not sitting in the same room together.
That was the overarching challenge,
because we were very committed to the case method teaching
and active learning principles.
Because we know the evidence shows
this is the strongest way to ensure people
understand the material, can internalize the material,
and most importantly, translate it to apply it out
in field settings after they're out of the classroom.
We want to change the way public health practice is done.
They need to have all those steps
to be able to translate it into their work out in the field.
So we needed to keep the energy and the real evidence base
core of active learning and case method teaching
but be able to deliver that in a really very different format,
working in digital communities.
And what was really helpful with that was that,
working across the different teams, the partners
that we worked with.
Dr. Chris Dede with the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
who has a huge amount of experience
with teaching and with case method teaching,
and as well with just really transformative
technological thinking around, how do you do this well?
And then two other partners, Adrienne Phelps-Coco
and Carina Lin.
And they're both with the Division
of Continuing Education.
And they have a lot of experience
with enhancing engagement in online classrooms.
How do you bring that energy and that connection?
And so we worked with them to think through some strategies
for how to do that well.
How to bring in certain activities or certain ways
of integrating communications within the online course
to bring that sense of community engagement to the course.
Because that was really important.
There's a lot of times when people
talk about online education, there's
that lack that you don't get when you don't have
the face-to-face interaction.
And then how do you maintain-- how
do you get to know your students over the course of time?
How do you do effective evaluations of courses
in the online courses?
How do you balance the learning?
There's different ways.
So we really worked closely with them.
We've benefited so much from their knowledge.
And they were responsive and engaged.
And it was just a really nice meeting
of the minds, a trans-disciplinary
collaboration across different schools at Harvard.
So it's a good opportunity.
Our team is just phenomenal.
And then also, we brought in Megan Kipp, who
is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate
School of Education TIE, the Technology, Innovation,
and Education program.
She's been working in the field for a number of years now.
But she brings that training from Harvard,
working out in the field at universities
on digital education.
How do we create online courses to keep the students involved,
teaching a whole range of types of topics?
She came on working with our team in that way.
And she brought in a lot of really specialized knowledge
of, how do we operationalize a discussion when it's online?
It's very different than leading a discussion in person.
How do we handle sensitive topics online?
And then Carina and Adrienne were especially helpful
around that, too.
Because one of the topic areas we
were dealing with was weight stigma and discrimination.
And there's an enormous amount of weight shame
that even our learners may experience.
That's coming into our virtual classroom,
just like it would in an in-person classroom.
So there's a lot of kinds of issues to think through,
some that might be generic, in a sense, that any online course
needs to handle.
And some courses that are dealing
with really critical public health issues or mental health
issues have to be especially sensitive about.
We provided materials in different formats.
So we did have the traditional printout, or PDF
that they could do online, of the full case that they
would read, that was extensive and had the story.
We also built in an interactive case.
So where they'd almost walk through
it online, and they'd experience it in a different way.
So that was one way to bring that case to life
for people versus just reading it on the platform.
We certainly built in a lot of work with the discussion boards
and learned a lot from that experience
in terms of how to evolve that process going forward.
But there's a lot of opportunity for people
to interact and respond to each other's projects or comments.
And then there were group projects as well.
So thinking through, how would we bring these smaller groups
together so they can learn from each other,
to have discussions with each other?
Setting up a conference call line
so they can schedule times to actually have a conversation
and begin building relationships and then
begin building these projects so that you
could bring the intimacy into this larger classroom,
or online approach to learning.
Proud of, because I was involved with it from start to finish,
was the workshop we ran as part of this grant.
So we were able to convene a variety
of instructional designers, professors, program developers,
course designers from across Harvard, people
who were interested in bringing case method learning
to the online space.
Some of them had been doing it.
Some of them were interested in doing it
at all different levels of experience.
And they came from across Harvard,
and one person even came from MIT,
and convened for a half-day workshop.
And Chris Dede was a speaker.
We had several speakers.
And they talked about a variety of very applicable--
we talked about lessons learned from their experiences.
We talked about specific tools that were used for evaluation,
for using peer evaluation, ongoing evaluation that
talked about experience and smaller goals.
These were tools that people were just dying to have.
And then we had a mini hackathon at the very end,
where we had people work in small teams
and develop an instructional design
plan for one of STRIPED's new cases
that we're hoping also to do the same with, bring it
into the online space and be able to pilot
it and take that to the next phase.
So everyone came out with a deliverable of sorts.
And so they were able to present their ideas to the broader
workshop.
And they walked away with that experience
to be able to connect with other people.
The greatest value, I think, of that
was what the feedback was across the board.
We are so grateful to have had this opportunity to connect
with others across Harvard.
We do not get this opportunity enough.
There are so many resources here that we can share and continue
to connect with each other.