Towards the Well@School online course
We at the Well@School project are in the process of making an online course. The course will be aimed at professionals who are working at schools and want to enhance their skills in promoting mental health. The idea is, that the course will be freely available for everyone on the project website, so that they can study the materials independently and to do the assignments in their own phase.
With the COVID-19 we have of course been used to transferring all the teaching and training to online format. However, when starting to make a completely new online course from scratch, it is a long process. In order to ensure that the quality of the course is high and that the technical solutions support learning, there are a lot of things to take into consideration.
The planning of the course started by creating a syllabus. The project group worked together in order to get the syllabus to match the needs of the professionals working at schools. Its contents are based on the focus group interviews carried out in spring 2021, where our specialists discussed about the mental health promotion at schools with teachers, student health nurses and curators.
Another important phase in the planning process was choosing the platform for the online course. We wanted the course to be as user-friendly as possible, so it was important to spend time in comparing the features of different systems. With the assistance of Turku UAS’ IT specialists, we came across with the H5P. It provides a wide variety of different tools for creating the course contents and assignments into effective and easy to use online format.
So, the next big task is to start creating the actual contents of the course. We have already divided the responsibilities within the project group and started the planning of the materials. Hopefully in February, when we meet with the project group in Slovenia, we already have been able to produce some of the materials and assignments, so that we can spend the time in workshop in refining the outcomes!
