Hey! Welcome back.
As a little recap, I am creating an online mental health course for coaches. Athletics often cause excessive stress and anxiety, and helping coaches to understand and prevent this will hopefully have a positive effect on the mental health of athletes!
Throughout the last few weeks, I created and analyzed a survey to understand what it is that athletes are struggling with, and from there I decided the main topics for the course. This past week, I started to research the topics in order to create learning objectives and content!
To organize my research, I created categories based on the main topics I decided for the course. I am currently organizing my research in a Google Doc because it is what I am most familiar and comfortable with. In my document, I have created the following headings: building relationships, communication and encouragement, body image, post-competition, multi-sport athletes, and miscellaneous. By creating these headings, I am able to navigate the portion of the course I would like to focus on.
Because the research needed for this course will be quite extensive, I have only started to collect article titles and sources that seem relevant to the topics. I have been using the Google search engine to look for articles regarding the main topics. Once Google provides me with a list of websites, I quickly look at those whose titles seem applicable. After quickly scanning and skimming the text, I decide if it will be useful. If it is not useful, I simply return to looking for more sources. If it does seem pertinent, I copy the title and url to the appropriate heading in my Google Doc!
After I gather a few more sources, I will begin to dive into the articles and find quotations and information to use in the course. I need to ensure that I have the proper research backing this course because mental health is incredibly fragile. I will continue to collect more information, but I will also start to analyze it in the coming days as well.
An aspect that I did not include in my outline is participating in courses that have already been created. Before starting this project, I completed the Mental Health Awareness for Sport and Physical Activity online course from UK Coaching in preparation for creating my own course. I really did not take anything away from this course, and felt the information was too general and is already accessible to most people. Even though I did not learn anything specific to the topic, I learned about what I want to see in my own course and how I would like to communicate it. I decided that I am going to look for other courses similar to the one I am creating in order to improve my own!
This is definitely not the most exciting learning project and I don’t have much to show for it right now, but I am really hoping it will make a difference! Maybe some of you can help to test the course before it launches!
Thanks for tuning in!
x Paige Hamann