Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health OpenCourseWare

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.