Adamu Adamu, student supplementing his learning with JHSPH OCW
Adamu Adamu, a medical screening officer at the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria, decided last year to pursue a master’s of public health degree. But when he considered applying to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, he found he could not afford the tuition.
Although he is now studying public health in Scotland at the University of Dundee’s Division of Community Health Sciences, Adamu is getting a taste of what the Bloomberg School has to offer through the JHSPH OpenCourseWare program. He has downloaded portions of two courses – Social and Behavioral Foundations of Primary Health Care and Psychiatric Epidemiology – and has used material from the lectures and readings to complete assignments and supplement course content at his school.
“It’s a wonderful thing,” Adamu says of JHSPH OCW. “These days the world is a global village and I think that what Johns Hopkins is doing is a great service to humanity.”
Adamu, who has an interest in community mental health in disaster zones, says that JHSPH OCW provides access to resources that are not available to him at the University of Dundee, which has 16 students in its MPH program and nine faculty members. “It’s helped me to fully understand some of the concepts in public health that were not thoroughly covered in my school.”
The University of Dundee does not have a psychiatric epidemiologist on staff, so Adamu went online to the JHSPH OCW course, Psychiatric Epidemiology, to research the phenomenon of somatoform disorders, in which recurring physical symptoms cannot be explained by a medical diagnosis. He also used some lecture notes from the Social and Behavioral Foundations of Primary Health Care course to write an essay for one of his classes.
Adamu is currently reviewing the JHSPH OCW course, Understanding Cost-Effective Analysis in Health Care, to get a head start on a similar course at Dundee. His plan is to complete all of the Bloomberg School’s OCW classes.
“Some of us have limited materials to work with, but we have to bring ourselves up to international standards,” he says.
"These days the world is a global village and I think that what Johns Hopkins is doing is a great service to humanity."
