Abstract B01: Career 911: A massive open online course (MOOC) to promote healthcare workforce diversity
Authors: Simon Melissa A. , Tom Laura S. , Brown Kasey , Taylor Shaneah , Hajjar Nadia , Telles Emmanuel Cordova , Riva Erika de la 
Published: May 2016

Purpose: Building a diverse healthcare workforce warrants efforts to scale health careers education for underrepresented and nontraditional students, as health career opportunity programs are not accessible to many students. A massive open online course (MOOC) is a new model for education that offers knowledge and resources for free. Accessible globally to anyone with an internet connection, MOOCs have the potential to impart interdisciplinary knowledge and skills toward students' pursuits of health related careers. Here, we describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of the MOOC, “Career 911: Your Future Job in Medicine and Healthcare.” Career 911 seeks to enable students to explore health career options and build skills for their career journey, including: articulating a personal story, resume and cover letter writing, job search, interviewing, professional networking, and professional communications. We examine the reach and characteristics of enrolled learners from the first run of Career 911 (April 13 – May 24, 2015) and investigate the challenges and concerns students had about pursuing their healthcare career goals.

Methods: Data collected included students' self-reported demographic information from a pre-course survey as well as students' content usage and engagement from participant tracking logs and activity metadata. Self-reported career challenges were parsed from homework submissions and coded using standard qualitative methods.

Results: A total of 8,338 students from 159 different countries (44% from the United States) enrolled in the first run of Career 911. Whereas MOOC student populations tend to be male, older, highly educated, and employed, Career 911 students were female (56%), younger (mean = 34.2 and 18% were under the age of 22), currently still in school (43%), and not currently employed full time (63%). The most frequently cited challenges and concerns students had about pursuing their career goals included finances, time management, competition of getting jobs/getting into programs, and family commitments. In the six week run of the course, 450 students explored career websites; 220 students mapped their 1, 2, and 5-year career steps to achieve their target profession/job; 163 students put together a professional networking plan with informational interview questions; 132 students created a cover letter; and 125 students created a resume. A sizeable percentage of learners (11%) indicated that they were educators and were interested in using the course content for their own students.

Conclusion: MOOCs have the potential to scale health careers exploration and career readiness resources to global populations, supporting thousands of students through content that can scale. We discuss several key challenges and opportunities for future MOOCs to enhance entry into health care careers and impact health equity globally.

Citation Format: Melissa A. Simon, Laura S. Tom, Kasey Brown, Shaneah Taylor, Nadia Hajjar, Emmanuel Cordova Telles, Erika de la Riva. Career 911: A massive open online course (MOOC) to promote healthcare workforce diversity. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Eighth AACR Conference on The Science of Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; Nov 13-16, 2015; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2016;25(3 Suppl):Abstract nr B01.