For our last blog of 2016, we asked three of our collaborators from Sweden, the UK and South Africa to tell us about the most interesting health policy and systems research (HPSR) teaching resources they discovered at the recent 4^th Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Canada.

Their task was simple. Listen to presentations, look at posters, participate in sessions. However, don't do so purely from a research perspective. Also consider the information from a teaching perspective…and report back on what you discovered.

While more educational institutions are experimenting with open educational resources and curriculum delivery via the internet, it is still far from being standard practice. In fact, working with open educational resources raises a number of key questions: How can one fund the development of such courses or the conversion of existing courses into open access? How does one ensure that the courses are updated over time, as they will inevitably change? Will such courses just be shared on the web or will one offer student supervision and accreditation to go with them? In this blog, we explore the social enterprise model of Peoples-uni, as one way of answering some of these questions.

Already downloaded to 55 countries across the world, CHEPSAA’s open access master’s-level course Introduction to Complex Health Systems recently found a new home in Kilifi, Kenya, when it was pilot-taught with health managers and MPH students from the five counties in the coastal region of Kenya.

This course was inspired by our long-term health systems governance research within the Resilient and Responsive Health Systems (RESYST) Learning Site in Kilifi. From this work, we identified the need to support health system managers, particularly at the county level in Kenya as they undertake their new roles of steering and managing health services within a highly dynamic devolved political system.

If you have ever taught health policy and systems research (HPSR) at post-graduate level, you will know both the frustrations and intellectual “a-ha” moments that can result from having a classroom of students who have been trained in very different ways.

These differences can manifest in questions about course content (“Why are there so few objective facts and so many competing perspectives?”), difficulties with assignments (“I am not used to writing essays”), as well as bafflement (hopefully followed by clarity) around concepts that are taken for granted by some, but quite foreign to others.

This blog reflects on the concept of analytical generalisation – an idea that often comes up in HPSR methods courses and that can seem unusual to those most familiar with statistical generalisation from samples to populations. In this video, Dr Thameshree Naidu, a participant in CHEPSAA’s course Introduction to Health Policy and Systems Research, describes what an eye-opener the concept was to her.

Figure by Brian Castellani, sourced from Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Today’s health challenges are increasingly complex. There doesn’t seem to be only one solution. The challenges overlap, change frequently, and cross geographic, professional, and other boundaries. In this blog post, we introduce a promising approach to today’s health challenges: complex systems thinking (CST). We focus on some key and frequent obstacles that we have found in teaching and learning CST.

2014, 2015 and now 2016. This year marks the third anniversary of CHEPSAA’s open access courses Introduction to Complex Health Systems and Introduction to Health Policy and Systems Research and their teaching as part of the Winter School of the School of Public Health, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. These courses are complemented by Introduction to Health Policy Analysis, which has been running for much longer.

These courses are known for their active facilitation and interactive discussions and exercises, which are key to creating a stimulating environment and successful adult learning. As Khoti Gausi, a 2015 Winter School participant, said - the classroom should perhaps be called a discussion room.

Given the importance of this aspect of course delivery, and to coincide with the June/July teaching of all the CHEPSAA open access courses, we have asked young, up-and-coming health policy and systems educators from the CHEPSAA network for their “top tips” on how to stimulate and manage meaningful interactivity in teaching.