Between 2001 and 2020, the number of accredited undergraduate public health programs in the U.S. grew by more than 1,000%. New instructors arrived at new programs at institutions that had never taught public health before — without decades of institutional knowledge to draw from, without a centralized place to find evidence-based teaching materials, and without easy access to the kind of pedagogical expertise that schools like Boston University’s School of Public Health had spent nearly 50 years developing.

Teaching Public Health (TPH) was built in direct response to that gap. Conceived by BU SPH’s education team under the leadership of Amanda Velez, assistant dean of strategic educational initiatives, the platform brings together free courses, guides, teaching resources, and webinars in a single, openly accessible hub — designed for everyone from experienced public health faculty to practitioners picking up a new skill to instructors at resource-constrained institutions worldwide.

The brief was specific: build a platform that could serve two distinct audiences simultaneously, scale with the field as it grew, and feel rigorous enough to reflect the institutional credibility of one of the country’s leading schools of public health.

The central strategic decision on TPH was to make the LEARN/TEACH division the primary organizational logic — not a filter or a tab, but the top-level frame through which everything else on the site is encountered.

LEARN is built for students, practitioners, and anyone seeking to develop or update their public health knowledge. Free asynchronous courses — on biostatistics, epidemiology, global health, environmental health — are organized for easy browsing and enrollment. Guides and manuals give practitioners step-by-step access to critical skills without requiring formal enrollment. Credentials and Credly badges make course completion portable and shareable.

TEACH is built for instructors and educators. Inclusive teaching resources, instructional strategy guides, scholarship of teaching and learning, and the archive of TPH’s annual webinar symposium are organized to support a faculty member at any stage of their career — whether they’re building a course from scratch or refining a classroom practice they’ve been developing for years.

The homepage was designed to orient quickly: what TPH is, who it’s for, and how to get into the content that matters. Account creation is surfaced early for learners who want to track course progress and earn credentials, but the majority of content is accessible without an account — a deliberate choice for a platform whose stated goal is democratizing access to public health education resources.

Within courses and resources, a consistent tagging system lets users filter by discipline: Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Environmental Health, Global Health, Health Equity, Research Methods. The same resource can be tagged across multiple categories, reflecting the interdisciplinary reality of how public health is actually practiced and taught.

TPH launched in December 2025 with ten free online courses, a library of guides and manuals, a growing repository of teaching resources, and the full archive of TPH’s annual webinar symposium — all openly accessible to anyone.

The site was designed from the start to grow. More courses are in development. Volume two of the book Teaching Public Health is slated for publication in Spring 2026 and will be integrated into the platform. The education team intends to open the site to resource submissions from faculty outside BU, expanding TPH into a genuinely field-wide resource. The architecture was built to carry all of it.