Health Outcomes, Food Accessibility, and the Social Determinants of Health: Visualizing Disparities in South Carolina Using an Active Learning Approach With Interactive Dashboards

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic created mass disruptions throughout the world that continue to reverberate today. Among those are increasing demands for how public health information is delivered and consumed. Interactive dashboards such as the iconic Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering dashboard have become a staple of the pandemic. Today, public health departments in all 50 states, many universities, school systems, and cities maintain active COVID-19 dashboards driving demand for those with skills and expertise to create new and innovative solutions to communicate critical public health information. This article describes a data visualization curriculum, learning objectives, and course activities using an active learning approach in a fully online, asynchronous undergraduate setting. The activities utilize publicly available data whereby students assemble the requisite data and develop an interactive dashboard in Tableau to analyze the intersection of food accessibility, the social determinants of health, and health outcomes in select South Carolina counties. The lesson resulted in an improved student understanding of the factors associated with dietary-related illness while enhancing data literacy and dashboard design skills.