Opportunities and challenges in delivering postgraduate health economics programs online

Although education has been delivered remotely for over a century, technological advances provide the opportunity to access quality education through online study. Our experience delivering a postgraduate health economics program at Deakin University, Australia, illustrates the opportunities and challenges associated with online education. Online delivery improves the viability of postgraduate health economics, where the number of on-campus students may not be large enough to sustain a course. Online delivery can be designed to provide an equivalent learning experience for students compared to on-campus delivery, but this requires significant infrastructure and resourcing, including extensive staff time to prepare and update learning resources as well as ongoing student contact time essential to building successful learning communities. It also requires strong technical, academic, financial and political support at an organization level. Blended delivery, combining online and in-person components, are popular with students due to flexibility and in-person social interaction.