According to Nap Hosang, director of the Online/On Campus Professional MPH Program, the University was not able to add training capacity in the form of bricks and mortar, so the decision was made to go forward with a new online program. From the outset, the desire of the educators has been to provide a very high quality education product.

Offerings

At present, Berkeley is offering a fixed menu of 14 courses and all are being taught by experienced Berkeley faculty who volunteer for the assignments. New course electives such as ones in epidemiology, nutrition, electronic medical records, or global health will be added later, according to Hosang. The school’s goal is “to get it right for California” and all enrollees are now in the same western time zone. Next year, students in other US time zones will be included and following that the plan is to include foreign students.

Students will be admitted into the program at three times during the year and the goal is to have 40-50 students the first year. Admission requirements for the online modality are equivalent to those for full time on campus students.

The cost of the program is $1,000 per semester credit unit and 42 credits are required for the degree. There are other costs associated with various fees and for the travel expenses associated with making trips to the campus. In total, Hosang estimated the total cost of the degree to be approximately $55,000 over the 28 months of the program. For out of state students, the cost of the MPH online is the same as on campus. For California residents, the online course is actually more expensive since there is no tuition reduction for in-state residents.

Interdisciplinary

The Berkeley program is an interdisciplinary MPH because the students will be given the opportunity to select courses from multiple subjects. One half of the credits must be taken in core public health courses and the other half selected from electives in the area of concentration. The interdisciplinary program was set up specifically to be more customizable for the mid-career professionals who would be likely to be taking this program and wanting courses from a wider variety of topic areas such as media advocacy, health disparities, or organizational behavior and management.

More Work

Already the faculty participants in the online MPH program have concluded that teaching online is a lot of work. Even though the teachers may be familiar with the course content, it still requires 3-4 months to build each course, says Hosang. However, many of the faculty who were skeptical or fearful about online teaching have enjoyed the benefits of online teaching such as the degree of interaction. 

Demand for Training

The demand for MPH training is high as Hosang and his colleagues discovered when they carried out a human resources analysis in California using three separate sources of information. And the deficit is not in that state alone, says Hosang, referring to a national estimate of a 400,000 person shortage of trained professionals in public health.

With 36-38 million persons, California has a significant deficit. To point out the degree of demand, Hosang noted the explosion of interest in public health among undergraduates at Berkeley which now graduates some 180 students with that major each year, and the high level of interest in global health careers stimulated by persons such as Bill Gates and Angelina Jolie. For example, he cited the case of one small African country that has over 100 non-governmental organizations each employing 10 or more persons. Books and movies with public health themes have also fueled the upsurge in interest.

Other Programs

The program at Berkeley follows on the heels of at least two other programs at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That latter institution began offering online opportunities as early as 1997 prompted by a CDC grant to provide certificate training for employees, according to Marie Diener-West, the Chair of the MPH Program and Professor of Biostatistics. Currently the Hopkins program has 250 full-time students enrolled on campus and 450 part-time students pursuing an internet based degree program over a 2.5 to 3 year period. The part time students are required to spend 20% of their time in Baltimore getting face to face instruction either in special sessions taking place in Baltimore in June and January or in Barcelona in November. Occasionally, face to face offerings are given in other cities such as Washington DC and other localities. The program prides itself in providing a seamless experience for persons pursuing either the online or onsite degree. They are equivalent, according to Diener-West, and the tuition is approximately the same though the online cost tends to be more expensive, she said.

Track Record

Recognizing the special challenges of online instruction, Hopkins has created a Center for Teaching and Learning which houses technicians and designers who can assist faculty with preparing for their courses. Both synchronous and asynchronous material is made available for the students. Hopkins has had the opportunity to improve its online teaching over the years as the technology for doing online courses has changed, students have changed, and more bandwidth has increased the capability of what the faculty can do. In fact, some of the features of the online teaching have bled over into the onsite teaching such as the use of prerecorded lectures to free up time for more small group work. Despite its relatively long track record, the Hopkins program still has potential for growth, said Diener-West. She said the school plans to add additional courses and to add other degree programs.