When the traffic on I-65 is bad or the weather turns nasty, it’s
easy for UAB students living in the sprawling Birmingham
suburbs to complain about the distance between their homes and
the UAB campus. Try telling that to Carol Haddad, who took classes
from the School of Health Professions from 6,500 miles away—in
Beirut.
Of course, Haddad wasn’t commuting across the Atlantic every
morning. She was taking advantage of SHP’s online course offerings,
which have become an increasingly popular way of spreading the
school’s curriculum—and reputation—not just across the country
but around the globe.
Born in Lebanon and raised in Bahrain, Haddad earned a
B.S. in nursing and a master’s in public health from the American
University of Beirut (AUB), then went to work at the AUB Medical
Center. In May 2003 she transferred to AUBMC’s medical-records
department and was offered the job of assistant medical records
administrator on the condition that she enroll in a health informatics
program and pass the American Health Information Management
Association (AHIMA) certification exam. “So I accepted gladly, and
I started searching the Internet and applied to two universities, one
of them UAB,” Haddad says. “Before that, I never knew that such a program existed.”
Career advancement was also on the mind of Carolyn Kelley, P.T., who attended the University of Texas and Rice University as an undergraduate, then chose Texas Women’s University in Houston for her master’s degree in physical therapy. Kelley later joined the faculty at TWU but decided she needed to earn a doctoral degree “to be able to fully support the mission of our program with excellence in teaching and research.” Fortunately, Kelley’s program director had met SHP physical therapy professor Cecilia Graham, Ph.D., at a national conference, and their discussion of SHP’s online P.T. curriculum helped Kelley begin her journey as a “virtual student” at UAB.
The thought of pursuing a degree from a university hundreds
or even thousands of miles away, with a computer as the only connection to the actual campus and instructors, can be daunting for some. However, most of SHP’s online students report that their
initial apprehensions fade quickly as they form their own routines
and develop a rhythm in taking courses and assembling projects. “I
wasn’t really apprehensive,” says Jennifer Twombly, who works in
the health information management (HIM) department at Spring
Harbor Hospital in Portland, Maine. “I enjoy the online courses
because I can work at my own pace. I even went on my honeymoon
during finals week and was able to take all my finals early.”
Kelley, who has to juggle academic and clinical duties and the
responsibility of raising two teenage daughters in addition to her
online courses, also says adapting to her classwork was relatively easy.
Like Twombly, she says the biggest challenge is collaborating on projects
with fellow online students who also are far away. “In one class I
was assigned to provide a presentation with a classmate who also lives out-of-state,” she says. “This is hard to coordinate when both of us
are busy and are 1,000 miles apart. Luckily, however, we’ve become
friends, and we were able to work on the final touches at the hotel
the evening before the presentation.”
Even Haddad, who arguably had the biggest obstacles to overcome
in completing her HIM courses from the other side of the globe, says she was able to find a comfortable niche thanks to consistent
support from SHP faculty, including adviser Sara Grostick
and instructors Pam Paustian, Kay Clements, and Natasha Cauley.
“Without them, I wouldn't have made it,” Haddad says.
The pioneering spirit of each student has paid off. Kelley says
she plans to switch to a tenure-track appointment at TWU when she
completes her doctorate, but already she says the online courses have
“forced me to read our professional literature more often, more critically,
and in areas that I’d thought were out of my area of interest.
However, I have found that I have been able to apply most of my
assignments and projects into my teaching or clinical interests.”