Open Online Courses in Public Health: Experience from Peoples-uni

Abstract

Open Online Courses (OOCs) are offered by Peoples-uni at http://ooc.peoples-uni.org to complement the courses run on a separate site for academic credit at http://courses.peoples-uni.org. They provide a wide range of online learning resources beyond those usually found in credit bearing Public Health courses. They are self-paced, and students can enrol themselves at any time and utilise Open Educational Resources free of copyright restrictions. In the two years that courses have been running, 1174 students from 100 countries have registered and among the 1597 enrolments in 14 courses, 15% gained a certificate of completion. Easily accessible and appealing to a wide geographical and professional audience, OOCs have the potential to play a part in establishing global Public Health capacity building programmes.