The Social Context of Mental Health and Illness

This course is a sociologist's view of mental illness and health care from past to present time, but mostly focused on the instructor's Canadian experience. There are some interesting insights from this perspective, however, the course needs work to make it more useful.

Good students will want to preview each section by skimming thru the slides and the summary video. This aids learning by obtaining an overall view and by exposing the learner to new terminology. Slide skimming is not possible because the instructor has not made them viewable separately. You will have to go through each video to see all slides. This also creates an additional problem for learners who take notes and want to incorporate the slides into notes.

Secondly, the instructor clearly enjoys lecturing, but lecturing is not always the same as teaching. I found it best to run the videos at 1.25 to 1.5 x speed to make more efficient use of time (and to allow time to stop the video and snip and paste slides into notes being taken).

Not much additional learning is possible in the forums, as very few students post there.

This course has potential but needs work.