Using technology to support achieve more

This last few months many of us have been beavering away working on the Faculty Health Challenge. The Health Challenge is part of the university initiative Achieve More.


I have been working with the academic lead and the rest of the team in the curriculum design process, designing and creating the website 'online workbook' and managing the blog. We've had quite a challenge logistically, as a faculty we simply haven't had the time in the curriculum to allow students to undertake this in a one week period like other faculties have. So we have taken a long and thin approach in delivering weekly content and resources over a 12 week period using Google Sites.

The Approach

Our student groups are working in a multi-disciplinary team to consider the impact cultural and area differences have on the perception of health and delivery of health care, and in doing so developing their own identity as a Global Citizen. They will be working in teams looking at:

1. What affects people’s health in this area? 
2. What can be done about it? 
3. Why hasn’t this been done before?

Why Google Sites?

It's easy to use, it's flexible, we can enrol all our students, facilitators and supervisors easily enough, we can share and restrict our videos via google circles, visually it looks a lot nicer than your typical VLE (well we think so) and it allows an opportunity for all our first year students to interact with Google Sites and Google Docs (should they choose to use docs). Also, our first years will already be using a mix of Blackboard and Minerva so we wanted something easy to navigate around as we don't need the full functionality of a VLE.

We have 40 groups of students, each group has a dedicated facilitator. We created the master site and copied it 40 times and then released it to each student group and their facilitator.

What tools and technology have been used?

The module content delivery comprises of a mixture of content specific weekly online resources such as links to external resources as well as resources created in house by academics, librarians and learning techs. These are in the form of videos, screencasts and presentations.

We're expecting our students to upload items to their own site as well as use the threaded comment feature on Google Sites if they want to have a discussion online around a particular week.

What about communication? Social Media? Twitter? Facebook?

What about it? We have no hashtag or Facebook group, I'll say no more on this. What I will say is that we have a fantastic resource created by our SALTS (Student Ambassadors for Learning and Teaching) which is called 'Hashtags & Healthcare'. If you'd like anymore info then let me know i'll share it with you. But essentially it's an online guide for students created by students looking at the potential of social media as well as the pitfalls for those in a healthcare profession.

We're leaving it up to our students to decide how they want to communicate with each other and work as a team, we've given them the opportunity to be able to have online discussion but if they'd rather meet or email or use another online space then they are welcome to do so.

We are using a private Google+ community for our facilitators to touch base with one another as the weeks continue. They can use this private space to share issues and ideas or just keep each other up to date on week to week progress.

We do however have a Health Challenge blog, this is a Wordpress site that run alongside the week by week delivery of the programme. The purpose of this is to feed in useful tips, blog posts from subject specialists, footage of the opening event and all the 'fun' stuff along side their week to week learning. This blog also feeds into each groups site but can also be viewed as a stand alone blog.



We're only into week 3 of the module and our students are getting ready to head out to their allocated neighbourhood next week. The next few weeks will start to get really interesting as the students start exploring their neighbourhoods (observation only) and hearing from our patients as educators!