Understanding Common Diseases - free online course

One of the important keys to improving your own health is learning as much as you can about your body and how it works. In 2013, one of my academic colleagues, Dr Kylie Mansfield and I worked on a great project to develop a free online course for the public called Understanding Common Diseases. The course is run by Open2Study, an arm of Open Universities Australia, and is made up of four online modules that runs over four weeks. The modules look at high blood pressure, diabetes, heartburn and reflux and the common cold. They cover material from the basics of the science behind these conditions, meeting a patient with the problem and go on to look at common medications, treatments and lifestyle changes to treat and prevent the health issues discussed. 

The course runs over a four week period and takes approximately two hours a week to cover all the material. Its self-paced and the video modules are run in blocks of 10-15 minutes so you really can log on and watch a clip whenever you have time. Almost 5,000 students have done the course so far and the reviews have been very positive. And did I mention it's free?