Acquiring best practice in online education to support distributed learning in Northern Ontario

About the author: 

Dr Emily Groot is a public health physician and DPhil in Evidence-Based Health Care candidate. She is currently the programme director of the NOSM University Public Health and Preventative Medicine (PHPM) residency programme and the medical director of Réseau ACCESS Network’s Treatment and Prevention (TAP) Clinic. 

Tell us a bit about your current work

I’m a physician specialising in public health and preventative medicine. I grew up and now work in Northern Ontario, an underserviced region of Canada. I split my time between a local public health agency, an HIV/AIDS service organisation and postgraduate medical education. I am also completing my DPhil in Evidence-Based Health Care at the University of Oxford, focusing on teaching evidence-informed decision-making in public health and preventive medicine.

What led you to take the Developing Online Educational Resources (DOER) short course?

I am the director of NOSM University’s Public Health and Preventive Medicine residency programme. The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (recently renamed NOSM University) was established to train healthcare providers to live and work in Northern Ontario and other northern, rural or remote regions. Our residents and faculty live and work across an 860,000-square kilometre area. As a result of our distributed learning model, almost all of our teaching is delivered online. I applied to the Developing Online Educational Resources (DOER) short course because I wanted to learn current best practices in online education in order to make our virtual sessions and online resources as effective as possible.

What was your favourite aspect of the DOER short course?

I loved meeting and learning from colleagues around the world, including our tutors and guest lecturers. The course gave me the opportunity to hear about innovative approaches in online education and new curriculum development resources from other regions. It was reassuring to hear that educators in other locations encountered similar challenges in online education, and together, learn about evidence-based strategies to address these challenges.

How will you apply what you learned in the DOER short course?

The DOER course provided me with a practical approach to developing an online educational module. As part of the course, I developed an online continuing professional development programme for public health and preventive medicine faculty and received helpful feedback on the curriculum and design. I am excited to launch this course for our faculty in the next few months.

Click here to learn more about the Developing Online Educational Resources (DOER) short course, next running Mon 06 Oct 2025 - Fri 28 Nov 2025.

Emily studied the course as a recipient of a full bursary. If you are a Primary Care Health Sciences staff member or DPhil student please find more details here of short course bursaries available for this course and the Teaching Evidence-Based Practice short course.