Context
This course counts as an APPLES Service Learning course. As such, we need occasionally to reflect on its service aspect.
Reflection
Our client is the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Gillings was founded in 1940 as the first school of Public Health at a state university. Throughout the years, Gillings developed and collaborated on many research projects and MPH practicums under its eight departments: Biostatistics, Environmental Sciences And Engineering, Epidemiology, Health Behavior, Health Policy And Management, Maternal And Child Health, Nutrition and Public Health Leadership. Gillings is able to outreach to many countries all over the world and make an impact.
Currently, Gillings has many interesting maps and datasets on its website that demonstrates its global impacts in the field. These datasets include information on projects and practicums around the world, in which students and researchers of the Gillings School have been involved. However, these maps are scattered on different webpages on the website. Moreover, since the maps are enabled through different APIs, they have different appearances and functionalities. As a result, it is very difficult for the users to navigate through these maps at once and see the entire story of the Gillings School’s global impact on research in the field of public health. The goal of our project is to develop a dashboard or an integrative tool that provides comprehensive and fascinating visualization of datasets together in a meaningful and coherent way. This project will help users to explore and see the scope of outreach of all projects and practicums under Gillings easily. The visualization will allow users (students, researchers, donors) to see a general statistics of projects globally and they can also filter the projects as they want. A big picture of what Gillings are doing is important for staff to catch up with the process and show the impact publicly.