Enhancing Online Learning for Public Health Graduate Students

Abstract

The use of Web 2.0 tools in an online graduate public health program is an opportunity to further engage students with supporting technology and enhance the reflexivity and satisfaction of the student and instructor dyad. This reflective practice summary article discusses the use of Flipgrid and Loom as tools to further describe assignments and navigation of the public health community. A decision tree was created and used to evaluate which Web 2.0 tool was most appropriate in the first two courses of the Master of Public Health (MPH) program. After a trial and error period, the results demonstrated a clear distinction between the first two courses of the program. Based on the needs of the student and alignment with public health curriculum, Loom is better suited for the initial course and Flipgrid for the second course. Further assessment of these tools and evolving technology advancement on embedding videos can be made to assess retention rates in these courses.