Showing my workings: Part 8

Here’s the Activity I showed in Part 6 (where I took it from D1 to D2 stage), now at D3, as an example of how critical reading feedback and redrafting change learning materials.

Activity 12.1: Health care and wellbeing in adulthood

Timing: About 15 minutes

Q1       Have you ever had experiences of not being able to access health care, or having to wait a long time to access it? If you have had these kinds of experiences, how did they affect your wellbeing? Write a few sentences to describe what happened

Reveal discussion

Here’s what one person wrote:

I couldn’t get pregnant when I wanted to, and it took nearly two years to get through all the tests to try to find out what the problem was, because of waiting lists for the various procedures. I was really distressed about not being able to get pregnant anyway and having to wait so long before we could even start treatment made it so much harder.

Q2  [Interactive poll] Think of the last time you used a health care service yourself. If you can’t think of an occasion for yourself, think of someone you know quite well. How much did it improve your overall health and wellbeing (or the health and wellbeing of the person you are thinking of):

1. A lot
2. A little
3. It made no difference
4. It decreased my wellbeing

Click through to see what other students reported.

Q3       Why did you give the answer you did to Q3? Write a few sentences about the experience you were thinking about.           

Reveal discussion

Here is what one person wrote:

I had been feeling tired for years, I finally went to the doctor and had some blood tests, it showed I had some vitamin deficiencies, I changed my diet and started taking some supplements and within a few months I was feeling much better.

[Activity ends]

So this went from being two 15 minute Activities, one focused on healthcare and the other on wellbeing, to just one 15 minute activity focused on both. Generally I favour separating out distinct concepts (here ‘healthcare’ and ‘wellbeing’), which is why I originally wrote it as two Activities. However, feedback from critical readers suggested that these concepts should be quite familiar to students by this stage of the module, and I was desperately trying to shave words and study time from the learning guide. Critical reader comments also suggested that my two activities seemed like just memory exercises, with insufficient link to the impact of lack of access to health care, and this also led me to rethink the Activity quite substantially. I was a bit sad to lose the Word Cloud activity but it wasn’t really needed any more and it’s very important to be driven by the pedagogy, not the shiny interactive tools!