MindEd open access learning portal personalises guidance on mental health issues

MindEd is an open-access learning portal providing vital information on mental health issues in youngsters, targeted at adults who work with children and young people.

It is a Consortium initiative hosted by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), funded by the Department of Health, providing free, completely open-access online education, available via tablets, phones and PCs.Users can access all learning without registering but on signing-up, receive a personalised learning pathway based on their profession and profile selections.

Challenge

The project’s vision was to provide bite-sized chunks of elearning designed to help adults support young people’s wellbeing through identifying, understanding and supporting children and young people with mental health issues.The MindEd Consortium comprises:

Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
Royal College of Psychiatrists
Royal College of Nursing
Royal College of General Practitioners
British Psychological Society
National Children’s Bureau
YoungMinds

and is partnered by:

British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy
HEE e-Learning for Healthcare.

City & Guilds Kineo was selected to develop the learning platform, using Totara Lear, working in collaboration with e-Learning for Healthcare (eLfH), who produced the elearning content.

The Totara Learn Solutio

City & Guilds Kineo adopted a user centred design approach, collaborating with subject matter experts in the MindEd team and end-users, to fully understand both the needs of the project as well as those of the target audiences.This enabled us to create detailed learner/user personas and map these to the key user journeys, based on their information needs. Through this process we clearly identified how the various audiences would navigate and interact with the MindEd site.Full, free, open access without the need to register was crucial to the project, in order to avoid any possible barriers for entry/usage. However, through registering on the site, users are provided with a personalised learning pathway / curriculum based on their profile selections (using Totara ‘audiences’ to dynamically assign programs and courses), as well as the ability to track progress and bookmark within the learning modules.The site was launched in March 2014 by Norman Lamb, Minister of State for Care and Support at the Department of Health. City & Guilds Kineo’s industry-leading, enterprise level Totara hosting & support ensures that the site continues to perform to the highest levels and the site continues to provide vital information about mental health in youngsters for people who work with children and young people.One key journey was to provide a detailed programme of learning to the learner, based on their job role. This provided them with a designated Learning Plan, which could also be saved.This provided learners with opportunity to have either a user-controlled experience, or a more structured approach. This allowed learners to have a more personalised approach to learning, and access learning how and when they needed it.MindEd selected City & Guilds Kineo as their Totara Partner following a formal RfP process. CG Kineo proposed Totara Learn in order to provide:

Open access with the option to register
Personalised learning pathways for registered users
Fully configurable to leverage Totara’s native functionality (eg dynamic audiences)
Being open-source also fully customisable, to meet the specific needs of the project
Integrated SSO with the NHS’ NLMS
‘Playing’ of content from an external content repository (eLfH)
Reporting export to a data warehouse.

In developing the project, Totara Learn program and audiences functionality were used extensively. A custom course format was also developed to make launching of the content really easy.

We selected CG Kineo as our chosen supplier on MindEd because they clearly understood what we were about and they have been excellent partners. They have delivered a very professional result and really become part of the MindEd team. We are looking forward to working with them again on future projects. – Keith Chambers, Programme Manager MindEd

Results

Mind Ed was officially launched in March 2014 and has over 14,000 registered users and has been visited by around 100,000 users since its launch, generating over 1.25 million page views.MindEd has been very positively received and continues to provide vital support.