The Brightside Trust
The Brightside Trust is a new charity that supports young people who aspire to go into the health care professions through higher education. The current project "Bright Journals" has received significant support in 2004-05 from the Higher Education Council's Aim Higher Initiative.
What The Brightside Trust needed
The Trust asked us to design a new type of online community; that supports online mentoring of school pupils by undergraduates who are already studying in medical schools and universities.
Brightside is concerned with those young people, often disadvantaged, who have the potential to succeed in healthcare careers but need an extra push to help them finish school and go on to Higher Education.
What the OTHER media did
Following a small scale pilot in 2003-04, we designed together with The Trust, a suite of software that would encourage mentoring conversations, train mentors, allow discussions between project co-ordinators and provide access to a rich library of resources to encourage an interest in medicine, nursing, pharmacy and the other health care professions.
Bright Journals include
- Individual webblog based journals for mentors and mentees
- SMS alerting of new postings
- Resource Library of health related articles, news and useful links
- Rule based monitoring to maintain child protection
- Mentor Training, a interactive self-paced introduction to mentoring
- Mentor Forums, allowing mentors to share their experiences of mentoring
- Co-ordinator Forum facilitating discussions between the project team across 25 UK universities
The software is based on our OTHERobjects CMS content management system but has been extended to include mentoring journals that are the heart of the Bright Journals project.
The mentoring challenge
Mentoring involves the support and encouragement of one person by another. This is often done face-to-face but there are significant opportunities offered by electronic mentoring.
Most e-mentoring involves forums or email but we wanted something more personal that would fit with the mentoring aims of The Trust.
We developed Bright Journals to include personal but shared weblogs or journals that are kept by mentor and mentee as a record of their conversations, discussions and interactions.
This has significant advantages over email in that it is private but grows into a full record of the relationship and over forums in that it is designed for one-to-one interactions.
The results
Now in its second year, Bright Journals is in use by nearly 25 university mentoring schemes an involves thousands of young people.
We are currently exploring with The Trust extensions to the project into other areas of Higher Education.
