For that reason, the developers have worked diligently to make the GCPE web site interactive, engaging, and easy to navigate for both students and faculty. In Paul's office, she clicks past the day's two dozen e-mail messages to give a tour of the GCPE website. Students can join in a discussion and have conversations with each other, but they don't have to be on-line at the same time. When students do wish to participate in a real-time discussion, they have access to an electronic chat room, where their comments can be read by others in the program as they type on keyboards. Professors hold office hours in these chat rooms.
Participants can even draw on-line, thanks to the technology of a whiteboard.
The certificate program does not try to duplicate the traditional classroom but rather to offer instruction to students in a way that gives them a sense of community while allowing them flexibility. Through the GCPE, they receive applied activities and assignments, an opportunity to participate in group projects, access to lecturers, and, in the chat room, real-time conversations with professors and other students. Paul emphasizes that although the certificate classes are delivered by modem, they are rigorous. They cover the same material as the traditional MPH program, and at the end of the semester, the students have to pass the same tests. Marnell Kretschmer wants to continue her studies at the Rollins School of Public Health and has timed her next child to arrive at the end of the certificate program and before the start of the Career Master of Public Health.