The Distance Education Division of the School of Public Health uses a "best-of-breed" approach when designing the systems used by students and faculty in our online courses. That is, unlike most institutions, we have created a custom course management system which empowers students and faculty alike to meet the unique needs of public health professionals worldwide.

Rather than asking students to simply read from textbooks, our online courses provide a variety of rich media through which students learn. At the core of all online courses are the lectures, which are built from the ground up specifically for online delivery. Recorded in a state-of-the-art studio on the School's East Baltimore campus, lectures are assembled by a team of media production staff who ensures high quality at every step of the process. Course lectures combine audio, PowerPoint slides, animations, and Flash movies to create a unique experience for online learners. Activities and quizzes can be embedded directly into lectures using Adobe Flash as the authoring environment.

Lectures are delivered using the Flash plug-in, which provides high-quality, cross-platform, bandwidth-sensitive playback of lecture materials that can be tailored to the download speed of the individual student. Students on high and low-bandwidth connections receive lecture presentations at the same high quality, regardless of the download speed of the individual student. Only video files are presented at different quality levels based on the available download speed the student.

In addition to streaming media lectures, online courses from the School provide a variety of readings and supporting materials. Most readings and resources are available in high-quality PDF format, many courses offer course lectures in MP3 format for offline use, and some courses use supplementary applications on CD-ROMs to enrich the learning process.

Online courses at JHSPH employ a variety of custom-built and off-the-shelf communication tools. FuseTalk Forums powers our threaded discussion system. It lets both system administrators and course faculty manage their threaded discussions with ease, enabling and disabling features of the system as needed by a given course.

We use Adobe's Flash Media Server to power Audio Chat, a custom-built application which permits small groups of student to communicate via voice and text chat. Students from anywhere in the world can work together simply by talking through Audio Chat. A similar tool is also available for text-only chats within the course environment.

LiveTalk is a core communication tool in all of the School's online courses. Built on top of Adobe's Acrobat Connect Professional platform, LiveTalk allows students and faculty communicate in real time across the globe. Faculty and students can speak to one another via audio or text chat. Faculty can share PowerPoint or PDF files with students, draw on virtual whiteboards, and take polls for student assessment and feedback.

Students are encouraged to keep in close contact with the course faculty, instructional designers, and Division staff when taking online courses. Our set of course evaluation tools helps drive continual feedback about the organization and effectiveness of all course materials.

All online courses offered by the School are delivered through a custom-built course management system (CMS) which runs on top of the highly capable ColdFusion application server. As our CMS is designed just for our courses, we can tailor it to meet the specific needs of our faculty, rather than wrangling a commercial solution to sometimes fit how faculty need to teach their courses.

Simplicity is key to getting any user up and running within a system. Behind the deceptively simple front end of our CMS are a broad range of tools with which faculty can create content, track student activity, and administer their online courses. Faculty and their teaching assistants can create both quizzes and complex simulations using online course tools and can view numerous reports about student activity in those quizzes and simulations. Additionally, faculty have, at their fingertips, reports on student progress throughout the course (including lecture "attendance" and supporting material downloads) as well as results of evaluations of lectures, exercises, and LiveTalks.

Faculty and students alike shape the development of each iteration of online course tools. By responding to the feedback of our users, we are able to develop a customized solution that truly meets everyone's needs.