Courses Taught by Brian Zikmund-Fisher

HBEHED597: Clear Health Communication

Graduate level
Online MPH only
This is a second year course for Online students
Winter term(s) for online MPH students;
3 credit hour(s) for online MPH students;
Instructor(s): Brian Zikmund-Fisher (Online MPH);
Prerequisites: Biostat 501, Pubhlth 508, Pubhlth 510, Pubhlth 511, Pubhlth 512, Pubhlth 513, Pubhlth 514, and Pubhlth 515
Advisory Prerequisites: None
Description: This course covers a variety of techniques and skills that lead to clear health communications, including ways of making health data more understandable and health messages more memorable. Participants practice these skills through a series of exercises and through creation of health communication products.
Learning Objectives: 1) Define clear, audience-appropriate goals for a health communication 2) Identify and use features of messages to increase message memorability (i.e., stickiness) 3) Identify and provide contextual information to make health data (e.g., test results, risk statistics) more intuitively understandable and usable by different audiences 4) Evaluate to what degree health messages follow best practices such as using plain language 5) Apply principles of user-centered design and usability testing to develop and refine health messages using audience input.

Graduate level
Residential
Fall term(s) for residential students;
3 credit hour(s) for residential students;
Instructor(s): Brian Zikmund-Fisher (Residential);
Prerequisites: None
Advisory Prerequisites: None
Description: This class focuses on broadly applicable message design principles that help health education and promotion messages to "stick" in recipients' minds. In addition to deconstructing memorable messages at a basic level, we will also consider the potential uses (and misuses) of first person narratives.

Graduate level
Residential
Winter term(s) for residential students;
3 credit hour(s) for residential students;
Instructor(s): Brian Zikmund-Fisher (Residential);
Prerequisites: None
Description: This course will provide students with a theoretical and practical understanding of when and why people feel their health is "at risk." We focus on building students' ability to use evidence based techniques that can increase understanding and use of health data by patients, communities, the media, and policy makers.