Six Rights to a Masters in Public Health Curriculum Redesign

Our course was originally designed in 2012 and delivered in 2013 and is available to Australian and international students. It is Masters by coursework, delivered online and includes 25% research, concluding with a capstone thesis assessment. To keep pace with advances in practice, exponential change in the health sector and evolving stakeholder needs, regular curriculum renewal is required. There are many approaches to curriculum design and many more tools for curriculum mapping to assist in the design process. Professor Romy Lawson creator of the Curriculum Design Workbench highlights that regardless of the tool used, the most important element for successful curriculum design is to ensure teaching team involvement and engagement from the outset. In line with this, our teaching team applied the evidence-based approach described in Emeritus Professor Geoff Scott’s Senior Office of Learning and Teaching Fellowship to inform our curriculum renewal.

Scott describes Six Rights to curriculum design for the 21st century graduate;

1. Right Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) first

2. Right Mapping

3. Right Assessment

4. Right Grading

5. Right Calibration

6. Right Learning Methods & Resources

We share this approach to encourage debate and so that our peers in other MPH courses may learn from our redesign experience. We describe our redesign journey in six steps. In recognition that having the Right CLOs is the foundation to any well designed course we applied a modified version of De Bono’s Six Hats to ensure all our stakeholder requirements had been considered in our course design. The CAPHIA Foundation Competencies for Public Health Graduates (Health Monitoring and Surveillance, Disease Prevention and Control, Health Protection, Health Promotion, Health Policy, Planning and Management, Evidence-Based Professional Population Health Practice) informed the “Right CLOs” and “Right Mapping.” We also propose a Delphi approach to inform our regular and ongoing curriculum renewal into the future.