The topic for my pod’s learning design is “Maintaining Mental Health as a University Student”, and the video I chose for this blog post is titled “The Importance of Social Support” from the Stanford Pain Medicine youtube channel. The video focuses on the role that social support can play for people who live with chronic pain. Though it isn’t strictly related to life as a university student, the lecturer, Matthew Hermann, addresses the biopsychosocial model of health, how the role of social support is often neglected, and how social support can enhance a person’s resiliency and self-efficacy. That is, I feel like the broader offers a lot of really interesting information, and has a broader application than its narrow focus.

    The video itself doesn’t prompt interaction from the student. Information is transmitted from the lecturer to the learner (though the delivery was perhaps a little dry, I found the material to be extremely interesting). The material isn’t really spoon-fed to the learner: instead, I hope that they would take in the material, grab on to it, and be able to reflect on it. 

    Our learning design is hoping to encourage interaction/discussion among learners, to encourage them to think about what they’ve covered in the material, and to make it more personally meaningful through interaction with their fellows. To that end, I would provide learners with a set of prompts that they could. Students could then share their thoughts, and provide comments on others’ reflections.

    My hope is that the comment section would give learners space to ask questions, and to respond to their classmate’s thoughts and questions. Considering the subject of our design, I don’t intend to have a rigid grading scheme, but instead learners would be expected to simply participate through an open discussion.

    Delivering the material in this way would create a manageable workload: the discussion is low stakes, without the high expectations of academic writing, and without the forced nature of the online discussion forums we complete for school. The material can be easily scaled for large groups, perhaps even dividing the learners into smaller groups, to allow them to build rapport with one another.