Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health OpenCourseWare

Abstract

The need for public health knowledge is ever increasing, but the educational options have been limited to coursework delivered by academics to individuals who can afford the cost of tuition at public health institutions. To overcome this disparity, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) has joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‐initiated OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement to publish and share its collection of course content with the public at no charge. The JHSPH OCW project began in 2005 with funding support from the Hewlett Foundation. Its publishing process was integrated into the school‐wide web supplement system for managing course content. To date, content from more than 60 graduate‐level courses has been published, drawing an average of 40,000 visitors per month. OCW provides resources for faculty and students, both within and outside JHSPH in their pursuit of public health education. An OCW Image Library was created to provide object‐level access to illustrations produced by JHSPH OCW to replace copyright‐protected images removed from faculty course materials. Internal support and external assistance are both essential for the success of an Open Educational Resources (OER) programme; JHSPH OCW would have been impossible without administrative buy‐in, faculty participation, an adaptable technology infrastructure, Hewlett Foundation funding, and shared wisdom from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is an ideal time for institutions to develop their own OER programmes, possibly by working with the OCW Consortium, through which institutions have access to the collective experience of existing OER producers.

Keywords:

• OpenCourseWare
• public health
• free course content
• Open Educational Resources
• image library

Institutional context

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) has been the leader in both research and education in the public health field since its founding in 1916. It employs 500 full‐time and 600 part‐time faculty, and matriculates 2000 students from more than 80 countries (JHSPH, 2008). As a post‐baccalaureate graduate school, JHSPH offers full‐time and part‐time masters and doctoral level degree programmes from 10 academic departments. Students may choose to apply to traditional classroom‐based (face‐to‐face) or part‐time web‐based distance education programmes – the latter includes an Internet‐based Master of Public Health (MPH) degree or a Doctor of Public Health degree, as well as certificate and training opportunities.

Rationale for free and open content

JHSPH is dedicated to the education of a diverse group of research scientists and public health professionals, a process inseparably linked to the discovery and application of new knowledge and, through these activities, to the improvement of health and prevention of disease and disability around the world. The school’s graduates can be found worldwide; they are leaders, making the discoveries, advancing the science, maintaining the public health infrastructure, and implementing programmes that improve the well‐being of the public. Nevertheless, even with the growth of its distance education programmes, JHSPH and the other schools of public health do not and cannot provide education to all who wish to learn. Although there are 40 schools of public health in the United States (ASPH, 2008) and approximately 75 in Europe (ASPHER, 2008) in addition to others in Asia, Africa, Australia, and Central and South America, only a small portion of the individuals seeking public health knowledge and training can attend these schools each year.

To address these disparities of opportunity, educational institutions are experimenting with Open Educational Resources (OER) by making valuable teaching materials and curricular content from academic courses freely available online and explicitly licensed for reuse. These efforts make a body of core and new scientific knowledge, as well as a collection of practical applications, available at no cost to hundreds of thousands of individuals who cannot pursue more formal modes of education because of distance, lack of funds, scheduling, and a host of other personal and professional hindrances. This free and open access to online content is not a substitute for distance learning, in which interaction with the course instructor is essential. At JHSPH, this OER project extends the continuum of education by disseminating knowledge to the global classroom. Of course, the sharing of class notes is a common practice that pre‐dates both the Internet and the OER movement. What makes OER projects such as JHSPH OpenCourseWare (OCW) different is that they are undertaken on an institutional basis and, more importantly, because the published content is not only freely accessible but also explicitly licensed for adaptation and reuse.

OpenCourseWare and public health

In 2004, Anne Margulies, then the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OCW, invited Dean Alfred Sommer and other senior JHSPH leaders to join the OCW. At the time, lecture slides, notes and other intellectual property of faculty were carefully guarded and only available to enrolled students on campus and in the classroom. Open sharing of course content as initiated by MIT in 2000 (MIT, 2001) was a novel concept that soon evolved into the broader OCW initiative, with a plan to recruit leading schools from diverse disciplines to adopt and embrace the open content model.

When the idea was presented at the School’s Faculty Senate, it was decided that OCW would be a worthwhile initiative and that a pilot project should be undertaken. Later that year, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation awarded a one‐year seed grant to JHSPH to develop the JHSPH OCW site and to publish content from 10 courses. The grant was subsequently renewed for an additional three years to include the publication of many of the School’s most important core and elective courses. More than 60 graduate‐level courses from all 10 departments have been published to date.

OpenCourseWare and technology

The OCW project at JHSPH would have been impossible without a strong technology platform atop the substantial infrastructure already in place to support the research and teaching activities of the faculty, who are accustomed to and require simple, easy‐to‐use solutions for managing course materials. With funding support, the system for publishing course materials online that existed at the time (Web supplement system) was improved to eliminate barriers for faculty members who elected to publish to the OCW website. The JHSPH goal was to create a unified publishing system that would merge the existing web supplement system with an OCW publishing process, enabling faculty to indicate interest in publishing to OCW and to provide OCW staff access to course materials. With experience from the pilot OCW project and input from faculty, staff, and students, the second generation of the web supplement system (CoursePlus) was introduced in 2006 to include standard course features – such as syllabi, calendars, lecture notes, assignments/exercises, reading lists, and so on – that are also the building blocks of OCW’s content offerings. The system was simple enough to allow faculty, teaching assistants (i.e. students), and administrative assistants with minimal training to create content‐rich course sites and easily indicate selected course components for distribution via the school’s OCW programme. This proved to be the key to achieving the long‐term goal of integrating web‐enhanced courses and OCW publishing into the everyday practice of teaching and learning at JHSPH. Although the use of CoursePlus has been considerable, only two courses currently posted on OCW were initiated via the checking feature in CoursePlus. Due to the intimate and informal atmosphere within the school, faculty prefer to approach the OCW team directly or provide consent to participate upon introduction.

Publishing process

At the time that JHSPH developed its pilot OCW web site, several institutions – MIT, Foothill‐de Anza Community College and Utah State University – were in various stages of OCW development. The MIT OCW had a mature publishing system at the time and served as the model for JHSPH. In the pilot phase at JHSPH, templates were created for Adobe’s ColdFusion platform. Course content was gathered from the web supplement system and the online course management system. A copyright clearance workflow was adapted from the MIT model, and cleared content was then loaded into templates and published to a staging server, affording course faculty the opportunity to approve the overall product before it was made available on the OCW website. The process was revised and streamlined when the online resource system for the on‐campus courses publishing system (CoursePlus) came online. The basic publishing process has remained the same ever since.

EduCommons, which was developed by The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning at Utah State University to provide an OER publication workflow, was considered for adoption at JHSPH. However, it was not chosen because it could not be integrated into the JHSPH‐wide publishing system due to its basis in a different scripting language (Python). The Sakai project was also ongoing at the time, but it did not yet have the functionality and usability needs for OCW, and integration costs would have been high. In retrospect, JHSPH OCW might have benefited from the use of these platforms, particularly EduCommons, which would have delivered a more automated and less labour‐intensive publishing process. Adoption of EduCommons or others would also have allowed JHSPH OCW to take advantage of the upgrades and new features that have emerged over time. Nevertheless, incompatibility and future support continues to pose a significant obstacle to the viability of these platforms.

Copyright management has been and remains the most time‐consuming component in the publishing process because of OCW’s policy that all materials must be cleared prior to posting. Faculty contributors provide sources for the copyright‐protected objects within their course materials, and the OCW staff then seek a solution to resolve each object’s use. These solutions include seeking permission from the object’s copyright holder, removal of the object, and replacement of the object in question with a new or modified one. A variety of factors, including object complexity, specificity, and criticality, are considered when choosing the right resolution for each object’s use. JHSPH OCW is able to confidently create and disseminate a large amount of open content without relying on the fair‐use arguments that have fostered the arguably excessive use of copyright‐protected content in the classroom teaching environment. On the other hand, this conservative approach has required the removal of a considerable amount of good educational content from the materials posted on OCW.

Enabling and impeding factors

JHSPH OCW was initiated with financial support from the Hewlett Foundation. The external funding allowed JHSPH to hire development and content acquisition and management staff. It is unreasonable, however, to expect that all institutions will receive external grant support for OCW. Many institutions have successfully launched OCW sites without external funding support. The Japanese institutions that developed the Japanese OCW Consortium are good examples: they have visionary leaders, effective technical infrastructures, and dedicated individuals. For many others, funding is required to provide the impetus that leads to a successful undertaking.

Of course, JHSPH OCW would not have been developed without the dedicated participation of its faculty. The willingness of instructors to share the content they have developed is essential to the continued success of OCW. Nevertheless, some instructors are reluctant to participate. Reasons for not participating include: reservations about the wide dissemination of content that is based on both their intellectual property developed over time and their accumulated expertise synthesised from years of education, concerns that others may use the course materials out of context, worries of diminished course enrolments, and trepidation about additional workload involved with developing an OCW course. Anecdotal evidence suggests that none of these reasons is truly valid. In fact, faculty gain from developing content for OCW: participation is recognised as a contribution to institutional education, is appropriate for inclusion in a personal resume, and is valued in the promotional process. Furthermore, lectures may be translated into other languages, and new Creative Commons‐licensed graphic objects commissioned for OCW can be incorporated into on‐campus and online lecture presentations. At this early stage, these benefits are not widely acknowledged in the faculty community, but increasing awareness and use of OCW will probably lead to greater resonance between instructors who contribute content, and their colleagues. Trepidation about increased workload is also likely to recede as more instructors see their colleagues participating in OCW because only a minimal level of faculty effort is required when publishing to OCW. At most, instructors may need to spend time researching and providing sources of the copyright‐protected materials used in lectures. Otherwise, faculty need only decide on the scope of the materials to be published in OCW and review the final product before launch. A training and education programme is currently in development to educate instructors on the use of open resources in the preparation of course materials.

Current status

OCW will operate at JHSPH as a part of its educational continuum, even without continuing external funding. The OCW publication process at JHSPH has matured to the stage at which it is now easily navigable by faculty and OCW staff. Submission of content has been simplified by the introduction of CoursePlus, and the everyday content management tasks of OCW staff have been streamlined over the three years of operation. With instructor consent, the OCW staff have direct access to content posted in CoursePlus, simplifying the review and copyright clearance process. The ColdFusion templates developed by the Center for Teaching and Learning with Technology, which houses the JHSPH OCW project, have also contributed to the overall simplicity and cost‐effectiveness of the workflow. Together with technology fees from other educational activities and the donations from users, JHSPH hopes to sustain the OCW project into the future without requiring that revenue be generated from the OCW content itself.

Furthermore, OCW has developed into a useful content resource and planning tool for faculty and students alike. For example, faculty who are preparing new educational materials and planning curriculum are able to review lecture slides, syllabi, reading lists, and assignments that other instructors have made available in OCW courses. Because all of the OCW materials are Creative Commons licensed, instructors are able to incorporate the content they find into their own courses, reducing faculty reliance on copyright‐protected materials. Instructors are also able to retrieve Creative Commons‐licensed charts, graphs, photographs, and illustrations from the OCW Image Library, which continually collects objects commissioned by OCW as replacements for copyright‐protected content. JHSPH OCW plans to evaluate faculty use of these resources while continuing to publicise the availability of these tools and to encourage their use.

OCW is also beginning to be used by JHSPH students as a study, reference and planning tool. Surveys of incoming students in 2006 and 2007 indicate that OCW is being used to review course materials, supplement course work, gather information during the course selection process, and prepare teaching materials.

JHSPH OCW has begun to publish content generated by other learning opportunities offered by the school. These include lecture series, seminars, training modules, and Grand Rounds, as well as some award‐winning student capstone presentations. This expansion of OCW’s mission to include public health content generated outside formal courses is an important development. As the JHSPH OCW team has participated in the OER movement over recent years, its understanding of what constitutes an OER has evolved beyond course content only to include a broader spectrum of teaching and learning content. Any student at JHSPH will readily admit that a great deal of teaching and learning occurs outside the classroom, and the inclusion of the resulting extracurricular content among OCW’s offerings expands access to that broader spectrum of resources, while also making it available for localisation to other teaching and learning contexts.

Impact

The 60+ courses published to date represent about one‐fifth of all didactic courses at JHSPH. However, they also represent most major courses required for or elected by students, and they could cover the majority of core curricula taught at other public health institutions. The results from respondents to a 2007 survey of incoming students revealed that 24% of MPH students and 38% of non‐MPH students used the OCW site before enrolling in courses, and that 8% and 10%, respectively, said that OCW influenced their decision to matriculate at JHSPH. A general survey of OCW visitors was also conducted, but the response rate remains very low. Statistics on web traffic show that visits to the JHSPH OCW site have increased gradually over time. The JSHPH OCW site averaged approximately 40,000 unique visitors per month from December 2007 through May 2008. As the OCW web site does not require any kind of registration, it is difficult to learn very much about user habits, expectations, and opinions. Survey results and anecdotal evidence indicate that educators at other institutions use OCW to develop lectures, courses, and curricula. For example, an instructor at a German university has indicated he is translating the lecture notes from OCW’s Statistical Reasoning courses for use by his own students. The JHSPH OCW content has also been incorporated into the Maternal Mortality learning module prepared by peoples‐uni.org, a public health capacity‐building project that mixes OER content from a variety of sources to meet the needs of learners in developing countries (Heller et al., 2007). These and many other uses of JHSPH content would be impossible without the Creative Commons licence terms, which allow localisation to other teaching and learning contexts.

Future directions

Just as the definition of OER can include learning content generated outside the classroom, JHSPH OCW is exploring the possibility of incorporating some student‐generated work into OCW’s online offerings. Most JHSPH OCW content is now generated by JHSPH faculty and some visiting subject matter experts, but it is possible that student‐generated content from academic courses or other teaching and learning activities would be seen as a valuable enhancement to OCW’s users. This approach is being pioneered by the University of Michigan with its dScribe program (Hanss, 2008). Before JHSPH OCW begins a similar process, there are several issues that require serious consideration – among them are permission, privacy, copyright, and quality. Although OCW’s policy is to secure copyright permission to use the materials before publishing faculty‐generated content, it is not truly necessary because the School holds copyright on materials created by faculty in the course of their instructional activities. This provision does not, however, extend to students, making the permission and licensing ramifications more complicated. As a pilot, after the end of the 2007 academic year, content of the presentations from several award‐winning capstone papers (a requirement for graduation with an MPH degree) was published on OCW. The OCW slides will crosslink with the full‐text papers of the capstone projects on the MPH programme’s web site. It is expected that the content published in this pilot will benefit prospective students, enrolling students, the MPH programme, and public health practitioners with interest in evaluation or research in those topic areas. Future content categories may include additional capstone presentations beyond the award winners, student class notes, and student projects.

The OCW Image Library is a simple tool that JHSPH OCW developed in 2008 to provide object‐level access for its audience to download individual objects (charts, graphs, illustrations, photographs, etc.) that were commissioned for the specific purpose of replacing copyright‐protected objects in OCW course materials. They are distributed under a Creative Commons BY‐NC‐SA licence, making them easily available for incorporation into other contexts. The OCW Image Library is searchable by keyword and browseable by topic or course of origin. The majority of the content is discipline specific, making it a valuable resource for public health educators, students, and professionals. At launch, the library included only those objects commissed by OCW; however, it is now expanding to include other licensed objects from within OCW’s offerings, including faculty‐produced charts, graphs, and photographs.

Although most of the JHSPH OCW core content is textual and graphic, a handful of courses feature an MP3 audio component. Survey results indicate that audio content is very popular among users, and OCW is likely to expand its audio offerings in the future. To accommodate users with hearing disabilities as well as those who simply prefer reading content instead of listening to it, JHSPH is exploring the possibility of making transcripts available for download. Before proceeding, JHSPH OCW must resolve several issues surrounding the provision of transcripts, including copyright, accessibility, and funding.

Lessons learned

Over the course of the JHSPH OCW experience, it has become clear that internal support and external assistance are both essential components for success of the programme. Internally, support from school administration, faculty contribution of course materials, and an adaptable technology infrastructure contribute to the development and growth. Sceptical faculty must be convinced of the utility and value of OCW, and the publishing system can be adapted from either an institution‐specific content management system like those used at JHSPH and Tufts University or an open source application, such as eduCommons. A large OCW staff is not necessary as long as shared resources are available to support them in their work with faculty; some universities, such as Notre Dame, hire student workers to help faculty and OCW staff with the development of open content. JHSPH OCW has also benefited from external assistance, including the Hewlett Foundation, shared guidance and wisdom from MIT and Tufts, and the collaborative environment fostered by the OER colleagues and OCW Consortium. The JHSPH OCW team has gained valuable information from conversing with participants, attending presentations at the semi‐annual OCW/OER conference and the annual Hewlett Grantees meeting, and visiting other OCW institutions.

Final comments

This is an ideal time for institutions to begin developing OER projects of their own. Pioneering OCW institutions are eager to share their collective experience and know‐how with others, and the OCW Consortium provides a one‐stop source for information on the OCW publishing process (OpenCourseWare Consortium, 2008a,b). Members and OCW Consortium officers are more than helpful and willing to share experiences, answer questions, and provide feedback.

Although OCW was initiated by MIT, other institutions should not hesitate to develop their own programmes, whether they are named OCW or given some other title. More than 200 institutions of higher learning have started participating in OCW‐style projects in an extremely short period of time; although its impact on learning may not be easily quantifiable.

The OER movement has changed the global educational landscape since its first announcement, giving academicians the impetus to share their intellectual content with the world.