HSPH edX courses help train workers in India

Workers at Piramal Life Sciences—a Mumbai, India-based company that develops pharmaceuticals and medical devices—are among the first at a corporation to sign up for Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) courses offered through edX, the online course platform founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

HSPH courses in Health in Numbers: Quantitative Methods in Clinical and Public Health Research and in Fundamentals of Clinical Trials (offered jointly with Harvard Medical School) are being used to train medical staff at the company, according to Swati Piramal, MPH ’92, vice chairperson of Piramal Enterprises.

“We trained our whole medical staff,” Piramal said in a January 1, 2014 article in The Hindu Business Line. “The edX courses work very well.”

Piramal, who serves on the HSPH Dean’s Advisory Board and is a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, noted that India is an important market for edX and is home to the largest population of edX learners outside the U.S.

Since HSPH began offering online courses through edX in fall 2012, hundreds of thousands around the world have signed up to learn about topics including biostatistics, epidemiology, environmental health, health policy, and genomics. The edX consortium currently includes 30 colleges and universities around the world, and countries and companies have also begun to partner with the online learning venture.

Read The Hindu Business Line article

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