Portal Aims to Boost Project-Based Learning.

How does great work done inside a classroom potentially become greater work outside it?

This problem has perplexed Jacey Greece, a clinical assistant professor of community health sciences, since she began teaching intensive practice-based courses. In this type of learning, teams of students are given real-world problems and then asked to generate workable action plans.

“Our students are already doing amazing work for clients, but they live on my hard drive. It’s a shame that they’re not seen more widely,” Greece said. “I want this knowledge to help clients in California, or to help an agency in rural Maine. If we can streamline this through the online process that we’re developing, we can engage in practice-based teaching much more effectively.”

Greece is heading a team creating an online portal to connect universities with public health providers and non-governmental organizations. CommunityLink would match students learning how to identify and address problems with outside groups seeking to solve them.

There are several SPH classes that have been traditionally been taught in a practice-based format, among them IH743: Implementing Health Programs in Developing Countries, IH 744: Program Design for Global Health, and PM 835: Lean Management in Health Care.

James Wolff, associate professor of global health; Malcolm Bryant, clinical associate professor of global health; and Gouri Gupte, assistant professor of health policy and management, are key faculty members who have embraced this method of teaching. They are part of a working group that will be among the first to test the CommunityLink platform in multiple courses and various disciplines, Greece said. “We’re really trying to take this idea and the concept of linking the classroom with the community, but we’re broadening the concept of community.”

The CommunityLink project is funded by a 2014 EdTech Seed Grant from the BU Digital Learning Initiative, which aims to spur innovation by fostering a startup culture to help shepherd the growth of small projects like Greece’s. But Greece cautioned that the fledgling project needs to apply the same evidence-based science that goes into effective public health.

“In thinking of how this platform might help multiple classrooms and multiple communities, we’re doing lots of baseline testing and assessments before implementing the tech portion,” she said. “We’re spending the spring semester to gather information from key stakeholders. We want to evaluate innovative teaching methods that might be applicable once CommunityLink is implemented.”

The key, Greece said, will be connecting the community service groups with the student groups that can help them. The web-based portal will need to be secure to satisfy multiple privacy concerns, as well as able to host collaborative sessions among multiple groups simultaneously.

Web engineers on the Charles River Campus with expertise in user-interface design are building the online portal. Until those initial security and infrastructure challenges are met, Greece and the team will hold off on CommunityLink’s technology component in order to refine the application of the current practice-based teaching model.

But once the portal is in place, Greece said, “Any agency will be able to see the scope of work that students have done and be able to select a project that fits their needs.”