The potential of an online educational platform to contribute to achieving sustainable development goals: a mixed-methods evaluation of the Peoples-uni online platform

Background This paper reports on an online platform, People’s Open Access Education Initiative (Peoples-uni), as a means of enhancing access to master’s level public health education for health professionals. Peoples-uni seeks to improve population health in low- and middle-income countries by building public health capacity through e-learning at very low cost. We report here an evaluation of the Peoples-uni programme, conducted within the context of Sustainable Development Goal 4, which seeks to “ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning” by 2030. The evaluation seeks to address the following three questions: (1) Did Peoples-uni meet its intended goals? (2) What were the different types of impacts that students experienced? (3) What suggestions for future changes in Peoples-uni did students recommend?