An Innovative, Integrated MPH Curriculum: Mobilizing an Organizational Change through a Curriculum Redesign Project

In Fall 2011, the Boston University School of Public Health began systematically redesigning its competency-based MPH curriculum in recognition that public health is ever-changing, with public health problems becoming more complex and public health professionals needing new and different skills. The School's student body is also changing, with an increasing number of students entering the program with prior public health coursework. These changes presented an opportunity for the School to evaluate and redesign its curriculum to provide students with a high-quality, interdisciplinary educational experience that will better prepare them for careers in public health. In order to accomplish this significant organizational change, the School is employing Kotter's framework for organizational change which is built on eight steps and helps organizations establish a sense of urgency, form a powerful guiding coalition, create and communicate a vision, implement this vision, and, most importantly, sustain the new organizational vision. Because such an undertaking affects so many stakeholders, strategies for working with change-resistant members of the community are also employed. Utilizing the Kotter framework meant engaging the School's faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community partners to develop and support an updated competency-based curriculum that is responsive to the field of public health. The revised curriculum, which is set to launch in Fall 2013, aims to be more efficient and effective in order to better prepare public health practitioners. Using the Kotter framework allowed the community to embrace the curriculum revision process and outcome, and also laid the groundwork for ongoing curriculum evaluation and modification.