Lovely Friday afternoon news! Our new and updated microcredential Teacher Development: Embedding Mental Health in the Curriculum is officially live and open for enrolment. This course is one of the case studies arising from the project when participants identified that training for educators was sorely needed. We launched it as an undergrad module earlier in the year and it was incredibly popular - learners' comments included:
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The vignettes used in this study were made with the Our Journey tool. This free online platform can be used by students to log on their study journeys, recognise their achievements reflect on how they overcame challenges and have grown as a result. Educators can support students to do this, and can also encourage them to share their journeys with their institutions to facilitate greater understanding of diverse students' challenges and experiences.
This internal report for the OU's Quality Enhancement and Innovation portfolio gives an overview of the first stage of the project. It explores some of the key considerations for practice that can be adopted in module and tuition design, and highlights good practice happening elsewhere in the sector.
As part of this project, we're currently piloting 7 innovative projects with a view to embedding wellbeing in distance learning:
Narratives shared by students and tutors in interviews have been turned into 10 anonymous vignettes. Feel free to use these for staff training, to inform course design, or any other way that suits you. These are image files, but if you would like PDF versions, or Word versions that are accessible for screen-reader users (or if you have any other queries) email [email protected]. In this project, 16 students and 5 tutors shared their experiences of barriers and enablers to mental wellbeing in learning that students have experienced. These were analysed using Thematic Analysis and were mapped to different areas of their educational experience. It became clear that many of the education-related barriers to wellbeing were actually the same as the enablers for wellbeing, meaning that a factor can be a barrier or an enabler, depending how it is designed and how the person experiences it. For example, social media can support wellbeing for some people but can undermine wellbeing for others; study skills can be a barrier if students don't have the skills they need, but can be an enabler once they're developed; and curriculum, tuition and assessment can all be enablers if designed and delivered well, accompanied with the right level of support.
These barriers and enablers can be represented as a taxonomy. This shows three central categories for both barriers and enablers: environmental, study-related and skills-related. Each of these is broken down into sub-categories and then themes of barriers and enablers. Barriers can be mapped across the taxonomy to corresponding enablers, and there are relationships between adjacent barriers and enablers. In this project, students and tutors have shared a number of barriers and enablers to mental wellbeing in distance learning. These include ways in which students can manage their mental health in learning, and ways for tutors, educators and course designers can help make distance learning facilitate mental wellbeing. These can be categorised into three areas:
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AuthorKate Lister is a lecturer in inclusive education at the Open University, UK, and is an associate for Advance HE. Categories
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