Thursday, February 14, 2002

An Online Course Teaches Nutrition Students How to Prescribe Vegetarian Diets By BROCK READ While teaching an online course introducing students in the University of Alabama System to nutrition science, Brie Turner-McGrievy says she noticed that "there wasn't a lot of focus on vegetarian nutrition." Few college courses, she observed, actually covered the nutrition needs of vegetarians. NHM 305 Title: "Vegetarian Nutrition" Institution: University of Alabama Instructor: Brie Turner-McGrievy, a staff dietitian at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine When offered: Spring Cost: $410 Enrollment: Five students are enrolled currently. URL: Information about the course and a sample lesson are available here. So Ms. Turner-McGrievy, a staff dietitian at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, solved the problem herself, proposing a new course on the topic. The university accepted, and thus was born "Vegetarian Nutrition," a three-credit-hour course that, like Ms. Turner-McGrievy's "Introduction to Nutrition," is taught entirely online. The course teaches future health professionals why and how to prescribe healthy vegetarian diets to certain people, including patients who have suffered heart disease or cancer, and those who simply want to lose weight or avoid eating meat. Students also learn about the sources of plant-based nutrients and food-policy issues. In creating the course, Ms. Turner-McGrievy composed a series of text lessons from scratch. Students read two lessons each week, each sprinkled with links to other Web sites, some offering simple definitions of terms and others serving as substantial online nutrition resources. Hyperlinking allows Ms. Turner-McGrievy to overcome one potential problem: the varying levels of experience that students bring to the course. Students enrolling in the class are encouraged, but not required, to have a background in nutrition. To accommodate students without prior knowledge of the field, Ms. Turner-McGrievy includes explanatory links -- describing, for example, the structure of proteins or the definition of chemical bonding -- that more advanced students can skip over. Each lesson ends in an activity, usually asking students to post comments about a particular topic on the course's threaded discussion board, which Ms. Turner-McGrievy frequents. Along with the activities and additional discussion requirements, students complete and submit exams online. They also write research papers of about five or six pages' length. Drawing on independent research, the students must cite a disputed nutrition-related topic, spell out opposing arguments about the issue, and offer their own viewpoints. According to Ms. Turner-McGrievy, "any kind of hot topic in nutrition" is fair game for the papers -- whether it be an investigation of the effects of dairy products on bone health or an analysis of recommended daily allowances of fiber. The papers offer students "a good way to explore a controversial issue on their own," she says. Ms. Turner-McGrievy speculates that the cost of the course and some students' apprehensions about online learning have kept enrollment low -- five students are taking the class this semester. But she hopes to increase enrollment by more actively recruiting students outside of the University of Alabama System: "I've started trying to go national," she says. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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