Company Overview
As a leading international authority on public health, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to protecting health and saving lives. Every day, the School works to keep millions around the world safe from illness and injury by pioneering new research, deploying its knowledge and expertise in the field and educating tomorrow's scientists and practitioners in the global defense of human life.

The Distance Education Division of the School carries out the task of designing, building and maintaining the infrastructure required to deliver online components for the School's teaching and learning activities. The School offers online courses towards a Masters of Public Health degree and also provides continuing education and training of public health practitioners in 37 countries around the world.

Business Challenge
The Distance Education Division was up to the challenge of making online learning as effective as possible. Two related challenges became apparent immediately: how to create a sense of community among online students and how to relieve professors from the burden of exploding email in-boxes.

In a traditional classroom setting, students easily interact with their teachers and with each other, sharing ideas, exploring concepts and even just asking questions. In online settings, students are isolated from each and have limited access to each other and to the professors.

In the classroom, asking a question is as simple as raising a hand. Online, this simple function can become tedious and redundant: frustrating at worst and unsatisfying at best. Students were flooding professors with emails just to ask questions, and since teaching time is always limited, professors were using up too much time responding to email.

Moreover, email lacks the one-to-many communication of the classroom. Whereas the answer to a student's oral question is for all to hear, email is designed for one-to-one or one-to-few communication. Therefore, not only were professors using up time often answering the same few questions, students were not benefiting from the learning that occurs from question-and-answer sessions.

In addition to these issues, students had no easy way to collaborate together and so were not benefiting from the significant learning that goes on through discussion and dialog. The negative effects ranged from poor morale through to student dissatisfaction.

Interaction and discussion are critical components of sustaining motivation and keeping the momentum going. Without that interaction, teaching staff were finding students were not taking the initiative to keep with material, think on their own or explore outside the readings and lectures. Left to their own devices, students were inclined to inertia. Sharing stories and ideas, arguing and discussing -- these activities are critical to the learning experience.

Throwing technology at the problem was not the answer. Students are there to learn public health best practices, not technology, and therefore the solution had to be, above anything else, easy and intuitive to use. Complex applications that are difficult to learn and ornery to use usually end up adding to the problem, not solving it.

Solution
After exploring various options, The Distance Education Division of the Bloomberg School of Public Health chose forums, and FuseTalk Education (formerly Enterprise) Edition, as the best way to deliver many-to-many collaboration within the online curriculum.

The key was ease-of-use. No collaboration tool will be effective if students and faculty don't like to use it. Forums, and especially FuseTalk Education (formerly Enterprise) Edition, provided an intuitive user interface that encourages use. FuseTalk provides a clear and simple approach to posting, replying and editing messages while still allowing for a wide range of features and options. Some of the key criteria included full permission-based access definitions, full text search, private messaging, personal customization options and external user authentication. Finally, FuseTalk's ability to fully integrate with the Division's ColdFusion environment made the decision simple.

The Division search for a solution included other options, including real-time tools like instant messaging and chat. However, because these technologies are designed for fast, brief conversations, they don't encourage length and depth. The Distance Education Division discovered quickly that forum-based threaded discussions yield much richer, deeper conversations than do chat-like tools.

Learning Management Systems also came under scrutiny. Issues here included the fact that most LM Systems continue to be document-driven and are therefore do not integrate well in implementations where streaming media is a core teaching tool. Moreover, the forum capabilities of most LM systems continue to be sketchy, generally providing only simple post-and-reply functionality while the Division was looking for tools such as forum-based polling and document sharing.

The Division's success with forums to drive online collaboration is largely due to their programmatic approach to adoption. Students, faculty and staff view forum-based communications as critical to the success of each course because forums are a pervasive part of every course and every program. This drive to accustom students and faculty to forum-based collaboration can't succeed if the forums are viewed as option rather than an integral part of the course structure and methodology: academic discussions must only occur in the forums.

This hard-nosed approach has proven to be a winner. Even before courses begin, students begin bonding by introducing themselves on the course forum, talking about their current jobs, the problems they face in their practices and their goals for their academic programs. Teachers set up specific forum assignments regularly and require students to respond to faculty questions or to pose questions only through the forums.

Keeping the forums active is a matter of building momentum. For example, timely topics of current interest to public health practitioners get plenty of air time on the forums - topics that might be outside of the course content. Faculty, too, are encouraged to post new questions regularly and to even post provoking or controversial messages to spark debate. Guest lecturers keep the forums fresh and get everyone interested and excited about participating.

The Division has also leveraged the forums to support small group work. Private forums and categories provide work groups and teaching assistants with a private space to collaborate on projects, homework and assignments, allowing them to be more open and candid than they might be on the open forums.

The Division's commitment to online collaboration extends beyond forums. They continue to look for new ways to encourage interaction and continue to investigate real-time methods such as FuseTalk Virtual Meeting's Chat Module to augment the forum-based system.

The benefits have been significant: both students and faculty regularly report that the quality of teaching and collaboration time is high. Faculty is much happier teaching and students' satisfaction levels rise as the interaction between faculty and students increases. High quality and successful students have helped make the Bloomberg School of Public Health and its Distance Education Division one of the world's leading educational institutions in its field.

Product Used
FuseTalk Education Edition with User Authentication Feature

WebSite
URL: http://www.jhsph.edu