Has anyone taken online courses from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health? I'm think of taking a few to transfer into my MPH program at another college and was just curious as to what to expect.
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John Hopkins MPH Online Courses
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I used to make a decent living tutoring people in this program who lived in PA. This program has it's benefits, but a lot of cons too
You can take the majority of the classes online. So that's convenient. Plus you have the most famous name in public health which is nice
The two main drawbacks: expense and support. The program is incredibly costly because they know their name is valuable. The other thing is that the office hours are online chats, aka gchat-style 'talking' with TAs. So, you're basically on your own for the courses. This last point is why I was in such demand as a tutor.
I can tell you though that the classes were excellent and the exams were pretty rough. No matter where in the world you are, the exams are proctored so it's not take home tests or anything. You will learn a lot if you put the time into it. Their intro to epi I thought was particularly tough. Bloomberg has a good rep for a reason
Good luck
You can take the majority of the classes online. So that's convenient. Plus you have the most famous name in public health which is nice
The two main drawbacks: expense and support. The program is incredibly costly because they know their name is valuable. The other thing is that the office hours are online chats, aka gchat-style 'talking' with TAs. So, you're basically on your own for the courses. This last point is why I was in such demand as a tutor.
I can tell you though that the classes were excellent and the exams were pretty rough. No matter where in the world you are, the exams are proctored so it's not take home tests or anything. You will learn a lot if you put the time into it. Their intro to epi I thought was particularly tough. Bloomberg has a good rep for a reason
Good luck
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Where do they proctor the tests? At Sylvan or something similar?
Hello. I'm enrolled in the Fundamentals of Epidemiology online course for this coming term and am wondering if you could give me any feedback about why you thought the Epi class was so challenging. Was it the biostatistics aspect, pace of the course, etc?
Thanks!
Hi,
You can find the course materials for Fundamentals of Epidemiology I and II on the JHSPH Open Courseware (OCW) site under the Biostatistics section:
http://ocw.jhsph.edu/Topics.cfm?topic_id=33
Best of luck with your course.
The exams were rough? How rough are they? This scares me too. I heard people complaining about this while visiting JHU. Do a lot people fail the class? Can you give some examples?
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People do fail the class. I had one person fail even after intense tutoring so I tried to give him his money back, but he wouldn't take it. Felt so bad for him
There a many physicians in the class, and some were my students. Many thought it was going to be easy, especially compared to med school, but they were out of practice and the class really whipped them into shape.
It's been a long time so I don't remember specifics, and I didn't actually take classes at Bloomberg. The things I recall are general things that I'm sure are on the website or you've heard through the grapevine. There's no multiple choice, the questions are fairly involved, and there's a lot of advanced terminology that one normally doesn't see in an intro to epi course. It was basically my intro and intermediate epi combined, a lot of material. Keep up with your readings and really understand the modules. Study your homework questions, my students seemed to think they were good practice for the final.
Best of luck to you!
EDIT: I'd like to reiterate that a lot of the difficulty of class seemed to stem from the lack of support that I had previously mentioned in my post months ago. If the online-chat style "office hours" are replaced with, say, TAs with phone appointments, then I think the frustration and fail rate would go down. To be fair, that might just be the cost of attending a (mostly) online MPH program
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