ADVANCEMENT OF THE PRACTICE
Open Access
BUILDING CAPACITY
Building Capacity Through On-Demand Learning
Darryl Booth, MBA
tions, leadership, and conflict resolutions all fill gaps in a traditional education. Making Time to Learn As we lead busy modern lives, one may feel there is not time enough to regularly consume and retain educational resources. But, as little as 15–30 minutes stolen here or there benefit the mind and make us want to learn more. With a little closer inspection, one could find time in the car—environmental health inspectors have plenty of “windshield time”—where an audiobook could play part of the time. Time spent doing housework, working out, or even walking the dog serves as additional opportunities. Making the Format Work for You Not all learning is in an audio format, which is easily played, started, and stopped. Some- times what we want to learn is in the Journal of Environmental Health ( JEH ) or another aca- demic paper, or within a PDF or a website. In its earlier days, text-to-speech was robotic and defined by gross mispronuncia- tions. Today, however, it is quite good and very accessible. Search TTS (text-to-speech) and you will easily find apps, browser exten- sions, and other tools quite willing to convert that long text into an audio file that can be consumed like a podcast or audiobook. One suggestion is to try NaturalReader (www.naturalreaders.com), which features a choice of artificial intelligence (AI) voices, speed control (i.e., reading at 1x or 2x nor- mal speed), and platforms (i.e., app or web- site. Listening (reading) at 1.5x normal speed feels kind of like a superpower. In Figure 1, I exported a PDF of the July/August 2024 JEH and loaded it into the reader. It worked great!
Editor’s Note: A need exists within environmental health agencies to increase their capacity to perform in an environment of diminishing resources. With limited resources and increasing demands, we need to seek new approaches to the practice of environmental health. Acutely aware of these challenges, the Journal publishes the Building Capacity column to educate, reinforce, and build on successes within the profession using technology to improve eciency and extend the impact of environmental health agencies. This column is authored by technical advisors of the National Environmental Health Association (NEHA) Data and Technology Section, as well as guest authors. The conclusions of this column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of NEHA. Darryl Booth has been monitoring regulatory and data tracking needs of environmental public health agencies for over 20 years. He serves as a technical advisor for the NEHA Data and Technology Section. Booth is the general manager of environmental health at Accela.
H ow do you learn? Do you learn by observing, listening, reading, or do- ing? Is it more fun in a social setting such as a classroom or when studying inde- pendently and at your own pace? If you are not sure of your learning style, tools such as the VARK Questionnaire (https://vark-learn. com/the-vark-questionnaire) can illuminate how you learn best. Everybody is dierent. If you consider yourself a lifelong learner and aspire to gain new skills and facts to advance your career or to improve your e- cacy, one thing is surely true—Easy access to educational content is as rich as it has ever been. I am referring to content such as books and audiobooks (many of which can be free through your library’s digital lending program), YouTube videos, TED talks, pod-
casts, and even university courses. Stanford and Harvard Universities both publish many online courses. There exist many other free and reasonably priced commercial oerings, too. For example, many of these oerings are available on LinkedIn, Coursera, and Khan Academy. And there are many, many more. We must also recognize from the National Environmental Health Association (NEHA) the excellent e-Learning offerings (www. neha.org/e-learning) and the incredibly impactful Environmental Health Leadership Academy (www.neha.org/environmental health-leadership-academy). Public health topics are not the only areas of education that add value to one’s skills and career opportunities. Fundamental top- ics such as public speaking, writing, negotia-
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Volume 87 • Number 4
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