online MPH

Online MPH Program Embraces a Global Audience

Nafisa Halim, a research assistant professor of global health, on adapting BUSPH coursework to best fit an online delivery model.

When the School of Public Health announced its innovative online MPH, much of the attention was focused on the strikingly low cost of the 100-percent remote program. But as the January 2023 roll-out date approaches, the nuts and bolts of the program are being finalized by a team tasked with creating a novel educational curriculum that provides the necessary core instruction and foundational skills of a traditional in-person MPH degree.

Nafisa Halim, a research assistant professor of global health, is helping guide the team adapting current BUSPH coursework to best fit an online delivery model.

Halim has been at SPH since 2011 and is an applied sociologist with research interests in developing, testing, and scaling up interventions to reduce intimate partner violence during pregnancy and risks of adverse pregnancy and childbirth outcomes among stigmatized populations, particularly those with sickle cell disease or sickle cell trait in India.

Halim has also worked on numerous clinical trials and large-scale program evaluations in Tanzania, Vietnam, Zambia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and Bangladesh. She has consulted with the World Health Organization, and served as a PI/Co-investigator on research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development, and private foundations. 

At SPH, this latest task is one that Halim finds both innovative and challenging: how to develop an online MPH program that provides increased flexibility for students, increased global presence for the School, and also ensures that the reduction in cost does not mean a lower level of instruction.

First off, for those who may not have heard much about the online MPH, what are some of the most interesting things about this new program?

What was exciting for me is how we, as a design team, were able to really translate the content from an in-person format to an online format without actually compromising the rigor. As an educator, that was really important to me because public health is such an important field. I really take it very seriously that students have solid training because they’re on the ground, they’re facing people, they’re actually making decisions in their daily lives that impact people.

The online MPH will not provide the full range of specialization options that are part of the in-person degree but at $24,000 for tuition—regardless of how long it takes to complete the program—it is about a third the price of a traditional MPH. How is SPH planning to achieve that?

If you think about it, all the indirect costs of accessing education are gone. It’s offered for a reduced price, but the reduced price is not because the content is thin. The reduced price is because all the infrastructure is a little different. It’s comparable to an onsite, in-person MPH, redesigned for a different audience in a different format.

The non-traditional aspect carries over into the types of students for whom the program is primarily designed. Can you discuss a bit about who these potential new students are?

One group would be the already-employed mid-career professionals. All of a sudden, they find themselves in roles where they have to make decisions about public health. So, they have some background, are highly motivated, and making very important decisions on everyday life, but they’re seeing that they lack some content and expertise to really address the needs related to health.

Another group is people who are also highly motivated and really want to get into public health, but due to visa issues, family issues and whatnot in a global health setting, for them accessing a program online is the only manageable way.

In a previous announcement, Dean Galea mentioned that another group of prospective students might be others for whom the time and cost of the in-person degree are prohibitive.

Many of my friends from Bangladesh went to Europe and America to do their higher education, sometimes leaving their kids behind with family. The psychological cost is tremendous… And one thing that we learned from COVID is that flexibility is important. Being able to spend time with loved ones, not having to remove themselves from their surroundings, being able to complete at their own pace — all of that matters.

This also seems to be an acknowledgement of the original mission of SPH, which was created to be that bridge between academia and mid-career professionals who wanted to add to their existing skillset.

Yes! I absolutely love to hear that because I remember many of us came into public health that way, many of the faculty members who are in this program right now. Just to give a little bit of background, I’m from a disciplinary sociology background and I moved to public health because public health takes those really lofty ideas, but then makes them actionable, programmable, with implementation and evaluation.

Why is this new program a good fit for BUSPH?

Because at BUSPH, out of all the public health schools I’ve seen, practice is always a very core component of what we are doing. Over time, science took precedence to some extent in public health. And that’s all for good reasons because we have to know what we are talking about before we start implementing it. But [the online MPH] is letting us attract practitioners in the field right now. We are fulfilling part of our mission to re-train and retool the public health workforce.

You’re working with a population that is not only familiar with online education, they were also intensively exposed to it in some way, shape, or form over the past three years. Is this the perfect time to be rolling out an online-only program because of that familiarity with online instruction?

Absolutely so. This is not a naive population. They are quite experienced with online education, and if COVID taught us anything, it’s that there is not just one way of thinking, one way of doing, one way of assessing rigor, one way of implementing rigor. We understood that we are much more creative as educators than we ever thought possible. The students understood that they are much more creative as learners than they ever knew.

Does this better position BUSPH as potentially having even more of a global presence than it did before?

As I said, I’m a sociologist by training. So the one thing that I cannot not help think about is that education has a purpose in society, that education is meant to reduce inequality. In a given population, there is always inequality, there are always levels. Education has always been that institution that reshuffles the whole distribution. My hope, my aspiration is that we will be able to achieve more in terms of reducing inequality with online MPH types of programs just because of the lower costs, and the ability to access all the features that come with online delivery. My hope is that we will be able to reach new populations by opening up access to faculty and the resources of BU and BUSPH and just maybe increase the slope of how fast we are reducing inequality.

Learn more about the Online MPH Degree and Program.