Johns Hopkins Offers Free Certificate Course on Contact Tracing

In a special arrangement with Bloomberg Philanthropies, a new course by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Health is training people to do COVID-19 contact tracing. The course is being delivered through Coursera and includes a certificate for those who complete it successfully. Already, nearly 200,000 people have enrolled.

The five-hour course teaches students about the science of SARS-CoV-2 and will show them how contact tracing is done, including nuances in how to build rapport with cases, identify their contacts and support both cases and their contacts to stop community transmission. The course will also cover ethical considerations around contact tracing, isolation and quarantine and identify common barriers to contact tracing efforts — along with strategies to overcome them.

The course is being taught by Emily Gurley, an associate scientist at Johns Hopkins, who has worked in public health in Bangladesh since 2003.

The course couldn't come any sooner. A report by Johns Hopkins that laid out a national plan for contact tracing in the United States estimated that the country would have to add about 100,000 paid or volunteer contact tracers to its public health workforce to keep up with expected demand.

To learn more, visit the course page on the Coursera website.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • cloud and circuit patterns with AI stamp

    Cloud Management Startup Launches Infrastructure Intelligence Tool

    A new AI-powered infrastructure intelligence tool from cloud management startup env0 aims to turn the fog of sprawling, enterprise-scale deployments into crisp, queryable insight, minus the spreadsheets, scripts, and late-night Slack threads.

  • human figures surrounded by precise arcs with book and gear icons

    Kennedy-King College Rolls Out Holistic Student Support Program

    Chicago's Kennedy-King College is expanding student support services through a collaboration between City Colleges of Chicago and One Million Degrees (OMD), a Chicago-based nonprofit serving low-income community college students.

  • college students in a classroom focus on a silver laptop, with a neural network diagram on the monitor in the background

    Report: 93% of Students Believe Gen AI Training Belongs in Degree Programs

    The vast majority of today's college students — 93% — believe generative AI training should be included in degree programs, according to a recent Coursera report. What's more, 86% of students consider gen AI the most crucial technical skill for career preparation, prioritizing it above in-demand skills such as data strategy and software development.

  • laptop and fish hook

    Security Firm Identifies Generative AI 'Vishing' Attack

    A new report from Ontinue's Cyber Defense Center has identified a complex, multi-stage cyber attack that leveraged social engineering, remote access tools, and signed binaries to infiltrate and persist within a target network.