It’s a quarter to 3 in the morning, and there’s nobody up at home except Roberta Troxell and her computer. Troxell, a nurse-midwife, is attending an online class from UIC SPH.

Troxell was a member of the first class at UIC to take Public Health Concepts and Practice via the Internet from the School of Public Health.

"This course was a way of introducing me to the field of public health," said Troxell. After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1975 with a nursing degree, she went back to school to get her nurse-midwife degree from UIC.

The course also introduced Troxell and several of her fellow students to the Internet.

"What a valuable tool it is for us," said Troxell, who was an Internet novice before she signed up for the course.

"This is the tool of future for keeping people current in their fields," she said. The added bonus was that she didn’t have to commute from Rockford to Chicago every week for class.

Taking a class online has hurdles, she said. "My one main concern was that I wouldn’t get to know everybody," she said, since the class never met together as a group with the instructor, Bernard J. Turnock, MD, MPH, clinical professor in the Community Health Sciences Division.

The class of about forty students was divided into work groups. Those groups could meet either online or in person to work on assignments.

"I do feel I’ve gotten to know Dr. Turnock," Troxell said. "We probably have more contact with him than if we were in a big group."

Turnock agrees. "I actually found that I can be more responsive to their needs," he said of the online student-teacher contact. "You end up knowing students better, their style, their thinking."

Thanks to a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and UI-OnLine in support of a new Health Professions Education Initiative, thirty-two new courses will be brought online in the areas of public health, nursing, pharmacy, and bio-informatics.

Adapted with permission from an article by Mary Galligan in UIC Alumni Magazine

Note: An online program tailored to meet the continuing education needs of public health practitioners is being developed by the School of Public Health. In addition to Public Health Concepts and Practice, other courses currently available online through the school include Principles of Management in Public Health, Principles of Environmental and Occupational Health, Principles of Epidemiology, Introduction to Biostatistics, and Resource Data Bases in Public Health. EnviroRisk, a computer-based learning program on environmental health and risk communication for the public health workforce will be ready for access September 30, 1999, with CME, CNE, and CEU credits available through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For information on EnviroRisk, contact Dr. Linda Forst at (312) 996-0806 or at
forst-l@uic.edu . For information on other SPH offerings, please visit our website at http://www.uic.edu/sph/