Online Courses

What are Bloomberg School Winter Institute Online Courses Like?

Course participants complete readings, view professionally produced video lectures, and may participate in any combination of online discussion forums, quizzes, and live, real-time sessions known as LiveTalks. Winter Institute online courses are rigorous and compact. A normal term of coursework (eight weeks of material and activity) is covered in two weeks or less. Online courses may be taken from anywhere in the world, and participants do not need to travel to Baltimore to complete their coursework.

Prerequisite: Introduction to Online Learning (IOL)

Introduction to Online Learning is a required prerequisite for all online courses from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. This is a free, non-credit, mini course that must be completed before you can enroll in any online course. The course takes about 2 hours to complete over the course of two weeks and requires participation in one scheduled LiveTalk to complete the class. If you are registering for online courses in the 2024 Winter Institute, please register for a November or December session of Introduction to Online Learning so that you can complete this requirement before your course begins.

Please note that registration for this course closes at 11:59pm Eastern U.S. time on the first Friday of the class.

Timing

Not all Winter Institute online courses are self-paced; in some courses, students move together as a cohort day by day with assignment due dates. Students should carefully review the course description to better understand the format of their chosen courses. 

All BSPH courses, whether face-to-face or online, require the following minimum time commitments, according to credit hour:

Many courses require participation in live, real-time synchronous sessions with live audio interaction with faculty and other students known as LiveTalks. Although every effort is made to schedule LiveTalks at convenient times for faculty and students, it is possible that the LiveTalks in your time zone may occur outside of regular business hours.

As with other Institute courses, it is likely that there will be assignments to complete prior to and/or after the classwork portion of the course.  

Technical Requirements

Please see the computing requirements for online courses for more information.

Winter Institute Online Course Listings 

For a full listing of courses offered online during the Winter Institute, please refer to the list on the course listing webpage, and look for courses with the suffix .89 in their course number. All courses with a .89 suffix will be offered asynchronously online, while courses with .11 suffixes will be offered onsite, courses with .79 suffix will be offered synchronously online, and courses with .49 suffix will be offered in a hybrid format so that some students can participate synchronously virtually, while other students will register for the onsite .11 section of the course. 

​Cost

Online courses cost the same amount per credit as comparable in-person courses. Please see Registration and Fees for more information.