System mapping, collaborating, and moving to an online platform
The Master of Science in Global Health program prioritizes experiential learning, culminating in a global health symposium in India – a rich cultural experience where students participate in field orientation visits and gain firsthand insight into how the Indian health care system functions. Learning how to create system maps is a key component of the experience. But just because the students aren’t travelling to India doesn’t mean they will miss out.
“The situation with COVID-19 obviously means that the students won’t be going to India, but we’ve adapted,” explains McMaster University’s Sue Barclay, who co-ordinates the symposium each year with Agnes Meershoek from Maastricht University in the Netherlands and colleagues from Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) in Manipal India.
“The field visits are designed to encourage cross-cultural collaboration as students from different backgrounds come together in groups to solve pressing global health problems – and that’s still happening, just in an online environment,” she says. “It’s not really even a pivot for us since the program has been about online group collaboration since its inception.”
Barclay explains that system mapping is an approach often used in global health consultancy work to quickly generate an overview of a system or a part of a system, to assess how the system is functioning. The symposium’s system mapping exercise is designed to introduce students to systems thinking, provide them with an opportunity to collaborate, and to take advantage of diversity in backgrounds, knowledge and skills among students from McMaster, Ahfad, and Maastricht universities.
As part of the symposium, and as they have done in the past, students will work in small groups focused on a particular topic, ranging from mental health to infectious diseases surveillance.
“The main difference this year is that there are no field visits but otherwise the process is the same,” says Barclay. “But the groups are necessarily smaller for online collaboration.”
Groups spend 3-5 days gathering information from a literature search and interviews with global health experts. At the end of the symposium, each group submits a system map and participates in a panel discussion.
Instead of focusing on India, this year students can choose the country they want to study, but are encouraged to choose a country where at least one of the group members is from, increasing the relevance for students.
Barclay and the team have also changed the final deliverable from a report to an online panel discussion, where students debate their findings and answer questions about their maps. “Rather than submit a report, we think the panel discussion will be a more stimulating format for an online symposium,” says Barclay.
“Right now, it’s about being agile in making the symposium content work online while making sure students gain the experience that’s most important: Work together in diverse groups to become familiar with a part of the health system functioning of a particular country.”
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