The UK-PHRST led the development of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) massive open online course (MOOC) “COVID-19: Tackling the Novel Coronavirus” and the course team have been named joint winners of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) Director’s Award for Excellence for Learning, Teaching, Assessment or the Wider Student Experience for their work with FutureLearn to rapidly develop this free online course to share learning on the pandemic. Informed by expertise from within LSHTM on outbreak response and including contributions from external institutions such as the WHO and Africa CDC, the course was produced in five weeks.
The course launched in March 2020 with a follow-up run in May 2020. The first run of the course reached over 200,000 participants in 184 countries and generated over 88,000 content comments from learners. The second run reached over 30,000 learners, making it the most popular LSHTM MOOC to date and the second most popular run of any course in its first iteration on the FutureLearn platform. The course was translated into seven languages – Arabic, French, Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese Spanish, Swahili.
The UK-PHRST is now using this experience to develop a framework to support the use of MOOCs as a tool in outbreak response in the future.
"Community through Crisis: COVID-19 and Healthcare Education"
As part of the FutureLearn Festival of Learning, four healthcare institutions present on how they rapidly developed courses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Maryirene Ibeto (UK-PHRST Research Fellow, LSTHM) delivered a presentation - “Community through Crisis: COVID-19 and Healthcare Education” - on the "COVID-19: Tackling the Novel Coronavirus" MOOC. Watch the presentations here (Mary's presentation starts at 5.40):