Humanity’s ever-expanding quest for resources and living space increases their interaction with the environment and animals living there. This expansion serves as brewing pot for many diseases such as covid-19, dengue, and malaria. Tackling these issues requires tight interdisciplinary approach, something that One Health approach offers. Recognizing this fact, UGM One Health Collaborating Center Task Force (OHCC Task Force) see that it is important to spread this awareness to students and scientists from various background. Thus, OHCC Task Force held summer course with the title, “One Health Approach in Newly Emerging and Re-Emerging Diseases” from 5 to 29 September 2022.
The course was designed with 3 semester credit and 77 hours of activities. It was composed of 31 topics that was delivered by the experts in the field. Among them, 10 were from our international partner institutions. The topics ranged from basic biomedical science such as “Receptors in the Dynamics of Infectious Disease,” up to health economics such as “Analysis of the Economic Burden of Health Care due to AMR.”
As much as 151 participants were registered to this course. Among these, 26 came from other countries such as Bangladesh, China, and Malaysia. Given the time difference between Indonesia and other countries, students are given options to engage in the lectures live or access the recording via eLOK, a Moodle-based learning management system developed by UGM. This way, students can manage their own learning pace and cater it to their convenience.
This summer course was funded by “Hibah Inovasi dan Internasionalisasi Akademik
Melalui Kursus Singkat (Summer Course) Daring Bidang Unggulan Lintasdisiplin Tahun
Anggaran 2022” and Directorate of Research UGM.
In the future, we plan to develop this summer course into massive open online course (MOOC). This way, we can better reach out to students and scientist from various background as well as spreading awareness for the importance of One Health approach in tackling health problems that we face. In addition, we plan to hold another summer course in the next year with a slightly different topic, depending on what will be more relevant to the world situation by that time.