Professor Gooley & the Flame of Mind
Mental Health eLearning & Research
The University of Hong Kong
Mental health is an essential part of health and is closely related to physical health; however, people may not be aware of its importance. Besides, according to World Health Organization (2010), the absence of mental illness is not equivalent to having a healthy state of mind. Therefore, it is important to understand the knowledge and skills to enhance mental health, in addition to the prevention of mental illness.
Thus, The Hong Kong Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research & Prevention (CSRP) of the University of Hong Kong has developed a 12-weeks web-based interactive mental health programme, "Professor Gooley & the Flame of Mind" for adolescents and their parents. The major goal of this program is to make use of the latest information and communication technology to develop an e-learning curriculum in order to enhance the mental wellbeing of adolescents and strengthen mutual communication between parent and child.
This web-based mental health educational programme is innovative and creative in the sense that it has created a virtual environment to learn mental health knowledge and skills and conduct assessment online, which might have been otherwise conducted in a traditional classroom setting. It is also able to accommodate large number of users and be able to collect useful data in the back-end for professional research and analysis.
Besides, the programme is designed like a role-playing game with missions to complete. The scenes and main characters of the 8 planets are also uniquely and creatively designed to match with the main theme and objectives of each e-learning module. By going through the journey, playing different mini games and interacting with different characters, participants can learn the knowledge and skills gradually in an interesting way.
In addition, the duration, pace and learning break of each e-learning module are carefully designed. Participants are required to learn the materials online and then finish an offline assignment on a weekly basis so that they have time to digest the materials, discuss the assignments with their parents and be more prepared for the next journey.
Moreover, parental involvement in the game creates a new channel of communication between parent and child. The programme would induce insightful thoughts for parents on how to enhance their children’s mental health.
The curriculum consists of eight e-learning modules and they are:
- The cognitive model
- Self-esteem and personal strengths
- Goal-setting and goal attainment
- Hope
- Communication skills
- Gratitude
- Problem-solving skills
- Review
Each e-learning module has a structured framework to facilitate students’ learning. It includes an adventure trailer, pre-assessment of corresponding module’s knowledge and skills, explanation of learning goals and objectives, presentation of module content, mini online games (as an e-learning task), followed by assignments and post assessments.
In order to evaluate whether the involvement of parents could enhance the mental health of their children, two e-learning platforms were developed, one for students (the edutainment platform) and another for parents (the infotainment platform). Parents would be able to learn the same materials as their child in their own user account. They will also receive additional educational materials regarding interaction skills with their adolescents such as providing emotional support and changing their negative thoughts.
To make the programme appealing to adolescents, the structured e-learning curriculum has been rewritten into an interesting story with multi-media and interactive components such as music, mini games and animation., They are supported by a team of professional and creative copywriter, music composer, illustrator, web designers and application programmers. With the collaboration of multi-disciplinary professionals, an attractive, creative and innovative website has been developed.
This web-based mental health programme targets all F.1-2 students and their parents in Hong Kong who are able to read Chinese. All secondary schools are invited to join this programme and participation is free of charge. No additional resources (eg. school hours, training) are required from schools.
The programme not only introduces the concept of adolescent mental health to students, parents and schools, it also utilizes the penetration power of the Internet and web interactivity to match with the contemporary teaching-and-learning model and government’s general policy to promote e-learning in education sector.
Besides, the evaluation results of this programme allow general public and both local and international professionals to get to know about the effectiveness of this kind of web-based intervention and it may be used as a benchmark for similar educational elearning programme.
In longer term, this kind of web-based intervention can be adopted and modified in other areas, such as health and financial management that can reach more students and working parents who do not have the capacity to participate in school-based classroom programmes.
