I wish the lesson had been a bit more in-depth this week, but the brevity was understandable given the need to introduce the course.  It was interesting to define “Global Health” as something beyond Community Health, but there was a very high degree of overlap (especially in the epidemiology definitions).  In an ideal world, it would be neat to offer this course paired with CHLH 101 (also 8 weeks and online) to allow the other students to have a basic background in community health issues before diving into a more global perspective.  It’s important to see these issues as present in our home communities as well, and not just across the world in West Africa. 

            I’m hoping to start a pattern of getting ahead on the coursework for this class so that I’m still able to dedicate as much time as it deserves once other classes start picking up speed.  I wish that a little more guidance had been provided on how to get started (the only intro email we got seemed to assume we’d somehow already found the learn.illinois class page, which I’ve never used before), but I figured things out eventually.  This will be the smallest class size I’ve ever had at U of I, and I hope the associated benefits aren’t lost on the online class format.  The community update posts I’ve read have certainly been more well written than the ones for CHLH 101 (and much better than I’d expect coming from engineers), but that must be a reflection on the type of people who signed up for this class: technically oriented, but with an interest in other fields and more broad ways of thinking.