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WHO IS GLOBAL HEALTH?

Jason L. Outlaw - Harvard School of Dental Medicine: jason_outlaw@hsdm.harvard.edu Niko Cunningham EdM - Technology, Innovation, and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education, & Kauffman Foundation Jason Ahn - Harvard Medical School, & Harvard Kennedy School of Government Michael Hadley MS - Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health, & Harvard Medical School Mehul Bhatt - Harvard Medical School, & Harvard Business School Abraham Itty - Harvard School of Dental Medicine Sebastian Schmidt – Department of History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art - Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sam Merabi DMD, MPH – Department of Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Dental Medicine

PILOTING AN INTERPROFESSIONAL CAREER GUIDANCE WEBSITE FOR STUDENTS

Background: The emerging field of global health captures the interest of an increasing
number of high school, college, and graduate students. Because global health crosses
many disciplines, professions, and epistemologies, students find it hard to understand the
pathways they might take to launch a career in this field. The Realm of Possibility is an
interactive website that fosters student interest in Global Health careers through a profile
based exchange of firsthand experiences. Consistent with the recommendations of the US
Department of Education’s 2010 National Educational Technology Plan, The Realm of
Possibility leverages increasingly ubiquitous tools and technologies such as social
networking to facilitate informal education outside of the classroom. This project was
piloted in the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at Harvard Graduate
School of Education in an Educational Software Design Course.


Methods: A student focus group determined that each contributor would create brief
video profiles discussing their career, non-work passions, a challenge they overcame, and
their source of inspiration. The 2-minute video clips were added to a video interface. In
November 2009, students in the Educational Software Design Course viewed the video
clips and offered feedback to four open-ended qualitative questions.


Results: Seventeen respondents completed the survey after viewing the videos on the
online platform. Their most poignant suggestions for improvement include: 1) showing
the content creators in action, 2) understanding how they overcame failure, 3) presenting
a typical day in their life, 4) helping students network and connect to resources, 5) adding
keywords to enable search, 6) making the length of the videos less than two minutes, 7)
adding demographic data and user-specific meta-data, 8) discussing work-life balance
and other influences on career decisions, 9) adding the person’s personal strategies for
success.


Conclusion: This pilot provided rich lessons that facilitated the development of a working
prototype for The Realm of Possibility, which will be located at StudentGlobalHealth.org.
Next, we will create a second prototype to incorporate the lessons learned from the pilot
into the structure of the profiles. Finally, we will collect a series of profiles to showcase
the diversity of approaches people have taken to build careers centered on improving
health.