Learning with us

If this is your first course, please review ‘Using FutureLearn’ for an introduction to learning with FutureLearn.

We’re delighted that you’ve joined the course and wish you a warm welcome to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The school is renowned for its research, postgraduate studies and continuing education in public and global health. In addition to our course participants, we have more than 4,000 students and 1,300 staff working in over 100 countries — all with a collective purpose to improve health worldwide.

How will we learn?

Throughout our three weeks together we will use articles, mini-lectures, and interviews with experts in the field to highlight some of the key issues and thinking around global health and disability. We will also build on our learning using a number of hypothetical case studies. We encourage you to assess your learning through quizzes and share your experiences and views through discussion with fellow learners and the course team. Some steps include reference lists and supplementary reading that you may find useful for further study.

How will I learn?

There is no single way to approach the course that guarantees success. The way you learn depends on many factors and will not necessarily be the same as everyone else. However, in order to maintain enthusiasm and gain confidence about your studies, why not take a more active role within the course? You could:

• Take notes on course steps. Which aspects of the material are most interesting to you and why? Is there anything you have struggled to understand? Why might that be?
• Analyse connections between the current step and previous ones to help build a clearer picture of a topic
• Ask yourself questions about what you’re learning and how it relates to your own experiences
• Discuss your learning with others and consider how you can apply new knowledge, either in your personal life or a professional situation
• Explain what you have learned to others if they are struggling.

In summary, one great way to figure out how to learn is to think about it.

An important note on course content and terminology

As you will learn throughout this course, the term “disability” covers a wide range of people with different attributes, needs and lives, living in very different circumstances all over the world. Whilst we have made a concerted effort to include the broadest range of voices and examples as possible to help you learn about disability and global health throughout this course, we recognise that there are gaps. We encourage you to reflect on disability in your setting throughout this course.

It is also really important that the language used to describe disability is respectful to people with disabilities and in line with the way they describe themselves. We have taken the time to ensure that the content of this course uses respectful terminology throughout. We also encourage you to check out the “See Also” Article below, on disability terminology etiquette, so that you are aware of respectful, versus disrespectful, language surrounding disability.

Join the discussion

Almost every step has space for conversation and debate: the Comments area. While Discussion steps feature more focused conversational tasks, anyone can talk about material within each step’s Comments area. We will regularly prompt you to share your thoughts and ideas with questions or suggestions at the end of a step. You can contribute to these conversations as and when you are able to. Please note that you should not share your own personal contact information, and please remember relevant professional standards of conduct, such as not revealing information that may identify one of your patients or students. You might like to read 5 tips and tools for social learning on FutureLearn to help you get the most out the platform’s social features.

This course is no longer being moderated by the LSHTM team. If you see a comment that violates FutureLearn’s Code of Conduct, please press the flag button beneath the comment for FutureLearn’s moderators to review.

Re-using course materials

If you’re an educator or work in an aligned field, we encourage you to download, adapt, and re-use the content from this course for teaching and learning purposes. Materials will be made available on the School’s Open Study platform.