Using Technology and Faculty-Student Collaboration to Standardize the Teaching of Essential Public Health Concepts: The City University of New York, School of Public Health Epidemiology Glossary Pilot Project

The City University of New York, School of Public Health (CUNY SPH) is a public university that operates as an academic consortium that employs resources across numerous CUNY colleges in order to provide students with broad access to graduate and undergraduate public health training and education. However, consistently teaching essential public health concepts that are built upon in more advanced courses in a relatively standardized fashion can be challenging in such a diverse setting with many faculty and adjuncts. The CUNY epidemiology glossary pilot project was developed in 2012 to help address some of these challenges by standardizing definitions for key terminology in epidemiology for use across the CUNY SPH courses, campuses and faculty, simultaneously creating a unique opportunity for ongoing faculty-student interaction and collaboration. The glossary was created online in an interactive format on Blackboard using the Wiki function, where students and faculty could access it easily in the same portal where digital course information could be found. In this format, individuals could review and refine existing definitions and add new term definitions along with citations and sources and add commentary for each definition to further interact outside of the classroom. Feedback from usability pilots of the glossary in both an undergraduate and graduate epidemiology course setting have been strongly positive; 78.5% (11/14) of graduate students and 81.8% (18/22) of undergraduate students reported that the glossary was helpful and/or easy to use. Future directions for the project include expanding the glossary and integrating it in courses across academic levels.