JHSPH OpenCourseWare (OCW)

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) is engaged in an OpenCourseWare (OCW) project to provide students, self learners, and educators anywhere in the world with free and open online access to the School's undergraduate and graduate courses. The concept of "opencourseware" involves freely providing educational content on the Internet so that access is not limited by how much money a learner has, or where he or she happens to live. An OpenCourseWare website does not constitute a distance-learning initiative. Rather, such a website, like JHSPH's, offers snapshots of content available in an academic course without interaction with faculty or students. Users are free to review the information on an OpenCourseWare website at their own pace, free of charge; no registration is required and no degrees or certificates are granted.

Contents available on JHSPH OCW vary depending on the particular course, but may include a syllabus, schedule, readings, lecture notes, video lectures, quizzes, assignments, exams, and related readings. As of this writing, JHSPH OCW offers course materials from 11 JHSPH graduate courses:

1. Understanding Cost Effectiveness Analysis in Health Care
2. Statistical Reasoning in Public Health
3. Statistical Reasoning in Public Health II
4. Family Planning Policies and Programs
5. Problem Solving for Immunization Programs
6. History of Public Health
7. Refugee Health Care
8. Social and Behavioral Foundations of Primary Health Care
9. Case Studies in Terrorism Training
10. Problems in the Design of Epidemiological Studies
11. International Nutrition

JHSPH OCW seeks to contribute to the "shared intellectual commons" in academia, which fosters collaboration across JHSPH and among other scholars across disciplines and around the world. To that end, JHSPH encourages educators to use the materials for curriculum development, students to use the resources to support their current learning, and self-learners to draw on the JHSPH OCW for self-study or supplementary use. Course materials offered on the JHSPH OCW website may be used, copied, distributed, translated, and modified, but only for non-commercial educational purposes that are made freely available to other users.

JHSPH OCW is expected to reach a steady - though never static - state by 2008. JHSPH will be evaluating the access, use, and impact of JHSPH OCW over this period; feedback from users is encouraged.