Gareth Eldridge - Mental Health module

This module was made in consultation with the Hotel School counselling services department. This involved meeting with the SMEs and analysing the needs of the particular student cohort in order to create an action map. This was followed by storyboarding and follow-up meetings to approve the final version.

Around 85% of the students at the university are international with the majority coming from India and Nepal. The aim of the module is to raise awareness of the services the counsellors provide and to increase engagement.

The module was sent out in the pre-arrival pack and was evaluated and iterated further after the first term in which it was used.

The module was made using:

H5P
Powerpoint

The Problem

The counselling services team was concerned that many of the international students were not making use of their services, despite this cohort being most likely to benefit from seeking support.

Analysis of why these students were not using the service was done in the form of interviews and feedback forms and yielded the following information.

Many of the students had low levels of English and had not understood the information that had previously been sent out prior to arrival. Some did not understand the information presented in the orientation session as they found the amount of information being delivered in a different language overwhelming. Consequently, they were unaware of the service.

Other students stated that had been aware of the provision of counselling at the start of their course but they forgot about this after they started and therefore did not use the service.

Some students revealed cross-cultural barriers to mental health services because going to a counsellor was not seen as an acceptable norm in their country.

Other students revealed that they thought the counsellor only provided help for serious mental health issues and was not there to help students with culture shock, homesickness and stress.

The Solution

This module was created to target Indian and Nepalese students by using a character they could identify with and presenting many of the issues they themselves commonly face when studying in a new country. However, it was sent to all new students regardless of nationality.

Adaptive Learning Design was used as the students are empowered to choose issues which they find most relevant and follow their own path through the content.

The module uses plain English and chunks information into manageable loads to make the information accessible to non-native speakers. It also applies principles of UDL such as multiple means of representation and a focus on real-world relevance.

The module was sent out to new students before arrival to replace the previous text-centric brochure that had previously been supplied. It was also sent out again to all new students in week 3 of their course to remind them of the counselling service.

This resulted in an increase in appointments with counselling services of around 15%.

METHODOLOGY IN CONTEXT

Context

Michael Allen's CCAF framework states that learning experiences should be situated within a context. This is a view shared with methodology taken from ELT classrooms. This also supplies a real-world situation and character that the learners can relate to, recruits interests and triggers the learner's schema of the topic.

Motivation

In this slide, I have embedded interactive elements which empower the user to take individualised pathways through the module thus supplying differentiation and adaptive learning design. Each option is clickable and takes the user to different content in the form of short videos about each concern. This also shows the relevance and usefulness of the module in line with the ARCS and MUSIC frameworks for building motivation.