Abstract: China is vigorously promoting major strategies such as “OBE certification”, “Internet+” and “first-class curriculum and specialty construction”, and the cultivation of application ability is the type of higher stage of talent cultivation. Environmental hygiene is a compulsory course for students majoring in preventive medicine. The teaching group adopted a series of improvement measures to solve the problems existing in the past teaching process, such as taking examination as the goal, not enough rich curriculum content, ignoring the ideological and political education of the course, and only paying attention to the final assessment. First of all, we take students as the center, aim at the goal of students higher-level ability training and lifelong learning, and reposition the curriculum goal; second, we integrate the teaching contents, pay attention to the explanation of basic theories in the teaching materials, supplement the frontier hot spots of the subject at any time, and cultivate the erudite vision of preventive medicine students; third, we fully tap the subject resources, attach importance to the ideological and political education of the course, and establish a “student-centered” comprehensive teaching system; finally, we pay attention to teaching reflection and establish the whole process evaluation mechanism. After nearly three years of teaching practice, we have achieved gratifying results. The results show that the comprehensive quality of the students has been significantly improved; the examination results of public health practitioners have been significantly improved; they have performed well in the public health comprehensive knowledge and skills competition; the employers have higher evaluation on the graduates' work performance.

Key words: student-centered, application-oriented, environmental hygiene, curriculum teaching design