Creating an Inter-professional and Experiential Course with Law and Public Health Students

This presentation will focus on the development and implementation of an inter-professional and experiential course offered at the University of Oklahoma.  While the particular course discussed will be Public Health Law, the presentation will focus more broadly on how to create a course that spans professional degree programs and intertwines practitioner-led projects with classroom learning. 

Within post-baccalaureate education, there is a silo effect among professional students.  Educational trends reflect that degree programs have focused on developing student skills within their professional fields but have struggled to develop necessary inter-professional skills and abilities.  Recently, programs have recognized the importance of inter-professional experiences for successful post-graduation employment and have adjusted their competencies accordingly.  The current difficulty lies in building a course that simulates that interaction. 

At the University of Oklahoma College of Public Health, we began providing our students with inter-professional educational opportunities.  One opportunity is the course Experiencing Public Health Law, which pairs law students (located on a different campus) with public health students.  Throughout the semester, the student pairs learn about public health law through some classroom-based teaching, but they are primarily assessed through their performances on practitioner-led projects.  Overall, the students must learn to contribute discipline-specific knowledge and skills to their team to successfully complete various policy analyses and do so while in a professional setting. 

Some of the difficulties of creating such a course include: (1) creating buy-in from other degree programs; (2) creating buy-in from practitioners; (3) developing a pedagogy that challenges students from both disciplines; and (4) logistics.   I will discuss these difficulties and how I overcame them.  I will also evaluate the course’s  strengths and weaknesses and provide ameliorative solutions.  By the end of the talk, audience members will have a model for how to build an inter-professional and experiential course within their own programs.