Students, Residents & Faculty Members Free Open School Access

If you are a student, resident, intern, professor, teacher, or dean, you get free access to the Open School. In order to set up the free access, you must have your account set up with the necessary information identifying you as one of these constituencies.

For your account, you need to choose from one of the below values for 'My Primary Role':

  • Student
  • Resident/Intern
  • Teacher/Professor
  • Dean

If you are a student or resident, choose from one of the below values under 'Student or Resident?':

  • Resident
  • Student-Full Time
  • Student-Part Time

There are a few ways to make sure your account is setup in the right way:


New Open School user - creating a new account

  1. Create your account at IHI.org
  2. You will then be prompted to provide an email address for your school or institution (it may be different from the email you use as your login username) and your year of graduation or end of your residency.screenshot of IHI account creation form
  3. After creating your account, you may go to ihi.org/onlinecourses . Please note you will have to logout and log back in to access your courses. You will be prompted to login with your newly created credentials and begin to access the Open School catalog of courses.

Existing Open School user - updating an existing account

  1. Go to My Account
  2. On the About Me tab update the Students and Residents section by clicking on the pencil icon
    screenshot of My Account Settings
  3. Under My Details update Primary Role by clicking the pencil iconscreenshot of Primary Role section
  4. After updating your account, you may go to ihi.org/onlinecourses . Please note you will have to logout and log back in to access your courses.

Troubleshooting and FAQs

When trying to access the Open School courses, I get a message asking me to subscribe

Review your profile. Under My Details, you should set your ‘Primary Role’ to ‘Student’, ‘Resident/Intern’, ‘Teacher/Professor’, or ‘Dean’. If you are a student or resident, please also select one of the values in the ‘Student or Resident?’ field. You will then be prompted to provide an email address for your school or institution (it may be different from the email you use as your login username) and your year of graduation or end of your residency.

After doing so, you should return to ihi.org, log out, and log back in again. This is necessary to ensure that the required changes to your account take effect. After doing so, you may return to ihi.org/onlinecourses , and you now should have access to the Open School catalog of courses. If you are still unable to access the Open School courses, try these steps again after completely closing and relaunching your browser. If that does not work, contact customer support.

I attempted to enroll for the Open School for free, but now I see that I have an invoice due.

Please contact support and indicate that you are a student, resident, intern, teacher, professor, or dean and that you need the invoice for the Open School subscription removed.

I am a teacher/professor, and many of my students have been reporting issues with reaching the Open School. What instructions should I give them?

Please direct students to follow the instructions presented in this article. If they previously had any of the troubleshooting issues described here, please encourage them to try again following the steps described in the answers.

Do I need to enroll in a subscription to get free access to the Open School?

No, you do not need to go through an enrollment process to access the Open School for free as a student, resident, intern, teacher, professor, or dean. You only need to follow the instructions as described on this page.