Online Teaching and Learning for Health Science Professionals is an open-access textbook for educators who teach online in nursing, medicine, allied health, and related fields. It responds to a familiar problem: health professions faculty often arrive at online teaching through their clinical and disciplinary expertise rather than through formal preparation in instructional design, and the resources available to them tend to be either too general to apply or too technical to use.
The book takes as its foundation Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education (1987) and Chickering and Ehrmann’s later work on technology as a lever for those principles (1996), reframed for contemporary online learning through five lenses: communication, collaboration, creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, and feedback and reflection. These lenses also connect to the 4Cs of the P21 Framework for 21st Century Learning, situating health professions education within broader conversations about the skills students need in practice.
Each chapter introduces one principle, reviews the research supporting it, and then turns to application. Readers will find teaching strategies, classroom vignettes drawn from health professions contexts, discussion of common challenges, and considerations for adapting approaches across course formats and clinical settings. The chapters can be read in sequence or consulted individually as questions arise in course design and revision.
The book was written collaboratively by doctoral students in the College of Education at the University of Houston, all of them working educators in health sciences fields, as part of a graduate course on distance education. Their dual perspective as both students and practitioners shapes the book throughout. Content review was provided by a senior curriculum developer in a large hospital system, and publication support came from UH Libraries Open Education Services.
Online Teaching and Learning for Health Science Professionals is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Readers are welcome to adopt, adapt, and share it in their own teaching and faculty development work.
