2018 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Promoting wellness to online employees and clients via innovative technology-enhanced activities: Transferability of ideas learned from promoting student-faculty wellness in online higher education

Marquart, Matthea S.; Nair, Murali Dharan

Our evolving society at present includes technology-enhanced online education, workplaces, and human service providers. In this online environment, students, coworkers, and clients who do not see each other in person may be at risk of feeling a loss of community or a loss of support around holistic wellness. Schools working in the field of online higher education, including online social work education programs, have created diverse approaches to supporting online student – faculty wellness. These approaches may also be helpful for human service providers with virtual clients, organizations with remote employees, or consultants who lead virtual trainings.

Schools working in the field of online higher education, including online social work education programs, have created diverse approaches to supporting online student wellness. In this session, the presenters will share examples of wellness-related programs from online higher educational institutions that can be applied with trainees, employees, and clients in human service organizations. Participants will have the opportunity to take away innovative ideas from diverse higher educational settings, share their own ideas with other participants, and consider new wellness ideas for their programs in diverse organizational settings.

The purpose of this interactive workshop is to share current research and obtain rich and enlightening discussion from audience to develop innovative “online wellness” programs in diverse human service settings. This session will be useful for educators and administrators working with online programs, managers who have virtual team members, clinicians or human service workers who have virtual clients, and anyone who leads online trainings or planning to initiative technology enhanced human service activities.

The session will draw on the presenters’ experiences incorporating wellness activities into their own online classrooms and programs, as well as their research in this area.

Interactivity for the session will include informal interactive polling with immediate polling results to gauge participants’ experiences and interests around the workshop topic, whole-group discussion questions to give the group the chance to share ideas, pair-share discussions to give participants the chance to consider how to apply the workshop content to their unique work environments, and time for Q&A. The importance would be to involve all audience members in the discussion of online wellness practices and how supervisors and administrators can affect human connectedness and social wellbeing to online staff and clients in human service organizations.