OwnSelf-Care (OSC)

COVID-19 has forced school closures in nearly 200 countries worldwide, disrupting the learning experiences of more than 1.7 billion students. Teachers, school administrators and families are similarly overwhelmed, grappling with tremendous stress, worry and anxiety.

OwnSelf-Care (OSC) supplements Singapore's mental health curriculum with a curated library of relevant, high-quality and effective self-care tools for students. Improving accessibility of digitized mental health and psychosocial tools that are appropriate and useful for education stakeholders, OSC catalyzes the delivery process of mental health education. Educators are empowered to create customized learning experiences, tapping into the wealth of resources provided by existing health and wellness apps. Streamlining the processes of differentiated instruction that meets the needs of diverse student bodies, OSC serves a vital tool while ensuring cohesive alignment with national mental health curriculum.

OSC serves to alleviate the tremendous burden faced by education stakeholders worldwide, simultaneously empowering students to take ownership of self-care. 

Singapore joins more than 200 schools that have mandated school closures to curtail COVID-19's spread, with 600,000 students abruptly thrust into remote learning.

• Beyond having a devastating impact on students, the pandemic has had detrimental effects on teachers, school administrators and families. This severely limits their capacity and capability to explore alternative technologies and effective pedagogies in mental health education.
• Education stakeholders are not equipped to be effective designers of digital mental health education. Existing measures are didactic, externally-derived solutions, such as teaching students to identify signs of distress and directing them to relevant help.
• A burgeoning market of health and wellness apps exist on the market for adults, serving as potent untapped resources. Navigating this plethora of options available presents a dilemma of choice and a challenge of aligning the selection of tools with national mental health curriculum.
• A large majority of the 325,000 mental health and wellness apps are designed for the adults, targeting the mass consumer market. This exacerbates mental health education inequality, alienating young learners who are particularly vulnerable and at risk. The freemium business model is inaccessible to students who lack the skills, knowledge and financial capability to access this dearth of mental health support.

How can we help education stakeholders gain access to relevant, quality and effective self-care tools which are cohesively aligned to national mental health curriculum? 

According to the National Association of School Psychologists, collaboration and coordination is necessary to equip schools with meeting the full continuum of student needs, streamlining the process to reduce gaps, redundancy and conflict which delays schools’ delivery of mental health and psychosocial support.

Amalgamating the processes of aggregator platforms and content curation, OwnSelf-Care (OSC) serves as a one-stop-shop that connects education stakeholders with the myriad of content provided by the burgeoning market of self-care apps. Offering a range of carefully-curated digital tools to ensure alignment with national mental health curriculum, OSC ensures cohesiveness throughout local schools while providing individual schools autonomy to select relevant strategies to meet the specific needs of their student profiles.

Serving as a vital tool to catalyze the delivery of effective mental health education for students, OSC's unique customization features allow educators to empower learners, creating a self-reliant and resilient generation able to cope with challenges of current and future pandemics. OSC shares the overwhelming burden of care experienced by education stakeholders, freeing up educators' capacity to focus on designing meaningful academic instruction.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has caused huge mental and psychological distress to individuals worldwide. Education stakeholders are similarly not spared, in particular educators. This is due to rapid changes in demands of teachers, who have had to struggle with adapting to e-learning modes of academic instruction while also providing mental health and psychosocial support to students during the pandemic. Having to grapple with their own worry, stress and anxieties while coping with increased responsibilities, educators experienced drastically higher levels of distress due to additional work demands during mandated school closures. 

Teachers face several struggles that can be resolved by the use of OSC:

• COVID-19 has accelerated the shift from traditional to online educational modes, challenging teachers, administrators and parents to swiftly adapt to new norms of remote instruction. OSC serves as a vital tool to aid teachers gain access and deploy useful self-care resources through the app, reducing the amount of time and effort needed to plan, craft and create digital lesson materials. By presenting a neatly curated selection of self-care practices for teachers that can be tweaked to suit learning objectives aligned with national mental health curriculum, this streamlines the process of lesson creation and reduces the pressures faced by educators. 
• Education stakeholders are not equipped to be effective designers of digital mental health education. Due to the rapidly evolving situation of COVID-19, teachers are pressed for time to research on the best technological methods of creating digital lessons for their academic instruction, much less acquiring the digital skills needed to provide effective mental health and psychosocial support for students. As a result, when existing, prepackaged resources are rolled out without personalization or differentiation for students, teachers find it hard to sustain engagement of learners and motivation. This results in suboptimal teaching and learning experiences. OSC presents teachers with a wide variety of self-care strategies available on existing health and wellness apps, ranging from mindful activity to inactivity. This is enables teachers to create personalized lessons that cater to the profile of their students, with differentiated instruction allowing for successful achievement of lesson objectives.

Currently, there does not appear to be cohesive, organized efforts by schools to offer mental health and psychosocial support systems to teachers. The focus has rightfully been on supporting the particularly at risk and vulnerable young learners. OSC serves to support education stakeholders by sharing the burden of care, effectively serving to supplement the support structures for students’ mental health and psychosocial wellbeing traditionally occupied by schools.

To understand and gain deeper insights into the needs of education stakeholders during times of pandemic to ensure that OSC achieves its intended outcomes and impact:

• Rigorous academic research is currently being conducted to review the findings of the pandemic's impact on education stakeholders in Singapore and globally. 
• Surveys and interviews will be conducted on stakeholders (teachers, primary caregivers and school administrators in order to allow them to voice their needs and share concerns.)
• Upon rolling out a pilot program with an initial prototype for users, app developers will continually adapt the design of OSC to improve on existing features. There is also a possibility of expanding on the offerings of the mobile app based on feedback, in line with suggestions for areas of improvement.
• Focused group discussions will also be conducted to gather feedback and responses to ensure that the development of OSC  continues on a trajectory that is aligned with the pressing needs of education stakeholders, while achieving the intended outcomes of supporting and empowering young learners to practice self-care and incorporate them into their daily routines.

OwnSelf-Care (OSC) serves to ease the rapidly burgeoning responsibilities of education stakeholders by providing a mobile app platform that serves as aggregator and content curator. Supporting teachers with a ready library of resources that can be used in adaptation to their pedagogy, OSC reduces gaps, redundancy, and conflict in mental health education. It also reduces stress faced by education stakeholders, empowering both educators and primary caregivers to turn to available resources to support learners' holistic development. Even in remote and hybrid learning settings, teachers are able to customize the experience, effectively engaging with students through a myriad of self-care practices.

OSC is in an early stage of ideation with multiple iterations which have been explored through rough sketches, paper models and simple storyboards. These low-fidelity prototypes have been used to identify major problems with the conceptualized solution. The continued iteration of OSC's design is meant to ensure that the continuum of needs of education stakeholders are met. Developed alongside continued rigorous research processes, we are in the process of creating a medium-fidelity prototype in the next month.