Developing and Applying an Evaluative Rubric to Support Continuing Education for Disease Intervention Professionals

The Certified in Disease Intervention (CDI) certification aims to reinforce and expand the expertise of those working at the community level to prevent the spread of infectious disease. To support the recertification process and promote continuing education of CDI competencies, a resource repository of relevant, high-quality materials is being developed. Interdisciplinary subject matter experts at Indiana University’s School of Public Health-Bloomington, a Council on Education for Public Health–accredited and Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health member school, developed a systematic approach to identify and vet training resources. The result was an evidence-informed rubric for assessing multiple attributes of online training materials (including Course Overview and Introduction, Learning Objectives, Learning Assessment and Activities, Instructional Materials, Social Awareness, Scenario-Based Learning, Timeliness of Content, Course Technology, Learner Support, and Accessibility and Usability), a list of resources with evaluation outcomes, and metadata tags for populating a searchable database. The team successfully curated a robust repository of high-quality educational resources. However, the list is not exhaustive, and future work is needed to capture and evaluate more resources and update when new trainings are released for disease intervention professionals in the United States.