Learner Reviews & Feedback for Systems Thinking In Public Health by Johns Hopkins University

As someone already experienced in healthcare system finance and operations, lean, and financial modeling, this class opened up a new paradigm of thinking. The key lesson from this course is understanding the types and importance of engagement with various stakeholders. Without it, even the most illuminating modeling an analysis will go unused and have little impact. Awesome course!!! Thank you Dr. Bishai and Dr. Paina!

For everyone involved in Public Health (and not only), complexity is obvious. Dealing with complexity is not! This highly pedagogical course offers all the necessary knowledge and tools to deal with it, while leaving behind the linear abstractive way of thinking. The lectures are analytical, highly informative, finely structured and well focused. Not boring even for a moment. I highly recommend it!

I have learned a lot throughout this course, and this course gave me the epiphany that Public Health is what I earnestly want to study in college. The way of using the background knowledge from various subjects was definitely awe-inspiring. It felt like learning macroeconomics integrated with history and biology. It was truely a novel experience. I am so glad I chose to take this course!

I found this course useful as it corresponds to many approaches that I use or intend to use in my work on understanding the life cycles of technologies. The course instructors have carefully compiled relevant examples to make it easy to understand many tricky concepts. Tutorials at the end of 3rd and 4th week are pretty useful.

I would love to attend a course with more involvement of students through peer assignments etc.

I thought this course was a wonderful introduction and overview of Systems Thinking in Public Health, with many valuable insights and real-world examples for the practical applications of the lecture topics. I would certainly recommend this to a friend or colleague. The supporting materials and vensim program were very accessible.

Extreme high quality content and presentation. Requires concentration and focus to receive full benefit.

There is a lot of value to be gained for those who want to be introduced to the vocabulary of Public Health Systems Thinking. I appreciate all the work that went into creating this course, thanks again.

Good, brief introduction to systems thinking and potential applications in public health, with plenty of time spent on examples. A bit too much repetition of content for me personally, as I would have preferred the time to be spent on delving into systems thinking more deeply. An excellent course to do after Model Thinking, especially as some models are referenced here without being explained.

During this pandemic, I spend most of the time at home, having online-classes. These left me plenty of time to look for an opportunity and learn new things like taking an online course at Coursera. As a prospective health worker, the existence of a pandemic which is a major problem in the field of public health makes me curious about how public health practitioners, the ones who are working overtime right now, dealing with this pandemic. This course definitely makes me relishing the prospects of public health. Thank you Coursera and Johns Hopkins University

I have an interest in systems thinking and complexity that dates back over four decades. With the arrival of COVID-19 I've gotten a lot more interested in public health and epidemiology. This course was a perfect next step after completing courses in basic epidemiology and contact tracing. The instructors were really excellent and the use of real world examples greatly added to applying theory to practice. The introduction to the modeling tools was also a plus. I would recommend this course to anyone who wants to develop a broader view of public health.

Excellent course, highly recommended for any who would begin to apply Systems Thinking in the Public Health domain. In addition to Causal Loop Diagrams as a major technique for static conceptual mapping of a proposed solution, the course reviews Dynamic mechanism, Stock-and-Flow techniques. The introduction of the learner to a free version of a commercial tool, Vensim, which can implement both techniques is well worth the price to get a certificate in this course!

Excellent course that gives a systematic insight into what to consider when looking at dynamic and complex systems in public health settings.

Would recommend this course to anyone who is looking at not just public health settings but also general policy settings within industry.

Very applicable to veterinary medicine. As a livestock veterinarian i essentially develop health policy for large populations of animals. Predictably DVMs deal with many unintended consequences at the system level.

This should be required material for veterinarians.

This course is brilliant and Im so glad i had the opportunity to learn from it. Thank you for taking the time to create such a course, there truly is a great need for this knowledge!

Great introduction to system thinking concepts, methods and tools. Accessible and very useful.

this course is really helped me with the way in thinking thank you so much

This is an amazing course that introduced me to the basics in understanding systems thinking and complexity including practice in system dynamics modeling. Whilst I am not from the public health sector, the understanding developed, lessons learnt, and practical experience with systems dynamics models will help me apply the lessons learns to other sectors. The instruction and additional resources were superb! Thank you Johns Hopkins and all the instructors for this informative and profound norm-changing experience that has enabled be to upscale my game in my post-graduate research.

It was a great introductory course on systems thinking in public health. Lots of good materials to read, great tutorials on vensim (although at one point I was not able to recreate one model due due to different version of Vensim used in the tutorial and what was available online; however understood the concept). Great job and thanks for making it free.

even if you do not use system thinking immediately, it is very useful to realise that finally, the complexity of the real world is acknowledged, and we are making progress in better understanding and representing this complexity. This is one of the best, most interesting course / information I had for many years

A very interesting course. Congratulations to all teachers for their clear and entertaining expositions. Software skills were a fantastic added value.

My only issue with this course was the choice of thinning it out eliminating some lessons in this revised edition. I would have loved to hear more.

Great course ! Relevant information, that can be applied in today's workforce. I enjoyed the slides and I also appreciated the discussions as well as the opportunity to use and learn more about Vensim. Thank-you David Bishai, MD, PhD, Professor and Ligia Paina, PhD, Assistant Scientist.

The course is very well-structured and informative. It was very helpful for me in terms of my internship project related to public health strategy. The tools used and the exercises were very engaging and useful as well. Got to learn a lot of new stuff.

This is a completely stunning course! The contents is exceptionally interesting and useful and well-organized. The lecturers are very engaging. Overall, highly recommended to anyone interested in public health field.

Great place to start or refresh on systems thinking, design, causal loop diagrams (CDL) and SF (Stock & Flow), both with VENSIM, as well as the public health context. Thanks to both instructors and the University.

Great course definitely learned a lot and feel that they can be applied in many areas within my career

Very detailed and practical but too technical.