[UPBEAT MUSIC] - I think for me and the time that I chose to do my masters online was this was required, though face to face wasn't an option. But I think on reflection, if you are working and juggling and there was a lot of people on the course juggling childcare commitments and work, having it online means that you have a little bit more flexibility around where you study to make it work for you.
So why I did a lot of my work at weekends. We have a Friday afternoon conference call and a lot of the other work and the commitments to self-study. And I got into a rhythm of doing a little bit of the days. But I think if I had to travel to campus midweek, that would have got increasingly difficult as through the course of the two years of doing the degree my workload picked up and it became quite a juggling act to get everything done and to navigate the course.
So I think for some people face to face works but for others online is definitely a viable alternative. I've covered a lot of that. Again, we have Canvas, we have the more formal side but then also the informal side. Lots of students will find other opportunities to collaborate and I think most students want that connection. Once I have that there so you make it happen. Obviously not everybody wants to engage.
But certainly enough cohort that made you feel like you had company, you weren't sitting online people to tell anyway and nurture the student environment in a different way.
- Thank you. Dr. Andrew.
- Yeah. For module 3, which is on health systems, one of the assessments is group work. Though you do have to work together in your groups and then you present already as a group. So you do get the chance to collaborate on some work, which is then assessed. We do encourage you to be critical and some of the work is challenging, it will challenge some of the assumptions that you might have about how the world works.
So do come onto the program with an open mind. And also self reflection. Quite often students get frustrated because they don't get the marks they were expecting. And that's perhaps because they're new to studying. But it's an opportunity to reflect, why did something not go quite as well as you wanted it to go or why did something go really well, and you weren't expecting it to go so well.
So as you go through the two years, we hope you'll have lots of opportunities for self-reflection and learning about yourself and realizing that there are actually interests, which are going to direct you which you weren't perhaps expecting.
- I think if you really enjoy the content and you're really absorbed in the masters and enjoyed the love of learning then I found it challenging but in some ways easy because I was doing something I really enjoyed and I was absorbing myself in a subject that I was finding fascinating, so it was incredibly rewarding.
- I would approach it by thinking, well, OK, what remains the same? Quite often problems just-- we have zombie problems that just never go away and they keep coming up. And they keep coming up when different health challenges present themselves. So things like inequality and inequity, these are undercurrents which very much affect how a global health issue plays out.
Global cooperation or lack of it. Global governance, I mean, there are rules that govern the way that global health develops and how it's governed. But the question is, who makes those rules? And we saw with COVID-19 that there was so much inequity and so much inequality within countries but also between countries to the point where global cooperation appeared to almost break down.
And we saw efforts that were too late like COVAX or the ACT-Accelerator which really should have existed pre-COVID-19 but didn't and so everybody had to scramble to create them in the midst of a pandemic. And unsurprisingly, inequity and inequality were characteristics of both of those governance mechanisms. So what things remain the same are going to be the future of Global Public Health because we need to resolve those, and they're very difficult to resolve but there are things that we can do
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