What is mental health psychology? | with the University of Liverpool

In this episode, we explore the University of Liverpool Online's MSc Mental Health Psychology programme. Designed for both those working in mental health and individuals without a psychology background, this flexible, fully online course covers essential mental health topics, assessments, and therapies

Participants

• Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Prospects
• Dr Victoria Vass -  Director of online studies in psychology, University of Liverpool
• Dr Sarah Thurgood - Programme director, psychology(Online Programmes), University of Liverpool.

Transcript

Dr Sarah Thurgood: The programme really is designed to support students from a variety of backgrounds. So it's not just that our students come from those backgrounds. We actually design it with those kind of factors in in mind.

Emily Slade: Hello and welcome back to Future You, the podcast brought to you by graduate careers experts, Prospects. I'm your host Emily Slade, and this episode looks at the Mental Health Psychology MSc available from the University of Liverpool.

Dr Sarah Thurgood: Hi, I'm Dr Sarah Thurgood. I am the programme director for University of Liverpool online, and that means that I'm responsible for working on the Mental health psychology programme, organisation of business programme and our psychology conversion programme. By profession, I'm actually a health psychologist, but I've worked a lot in the mental health field over the years, and have lots of interest in different types of health, mental health, things like that. Hence why I work on these programmes.

Dr Victoria Vass: I'm Dr Victoria Vass. I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool and the Director of Studies for the University of Liverpool online Psychology programme. So I work on the same programmes as Sarah. So we have our MSc psychology conversion, our MSc organisational and business Psychology programme, and our MSc Mental Health Studies Programme, which is what we'd like to talk about today.

Emily Slade: Brilliant. So if you would like to give just a quick overview on the MSc Mental Health Psychology programme for our listeners.

Dr Victoria Vass: So the MSC Mental Health Psychology programme is a specialised programme looking at mental health as one of the biggest health and well being issues that we have at the moment is, is mental health, particularly that came to prominence through the pandemic? Of course, I think that's got a lot more notoriety since then. How much mental health it has become an issue and something that needs more addressing, and particularly from the psychological perspective, the Mental Health Psychology programme really gives students a foundation in core principles of psychology. So it's not essential that they studied psychology before and then in the latter half of the programme specialises towards specific aspects of mental health, particularly around working in mental health, so looking at things like assessment, appraisal, interventions and specific psychotherapies, how is the programme structured? It's an eight module programme. Each of the taught modules carries 15 credits, so they're all equally weighted, and students then carry out a dissertation at the end of their programme. Of the first four modules, those are around core aspects of psychology that any psychologist would need to know. So core principles and underlying theory are covered in the first module, mind, brain and behavior. We then have a module around social psychology, so looking at the interaction between individuals and groups, so everything from relationships to conflict, and then we move through to look at data analysis techniques in psychology. So looking specifically at statistical methods and how they might be applied in research within psychology. That's often the bit that some of the students are a bit nervous about, but we have some really wonderful stats lecturers, and it's something that we're really proud of our teaching around. It's something that we've done a lot of work around. Sarah in particular, has done a lot of work to make sure that students are really well supported through statistics. So again, it's not something that students need to have had previous knowledge or teaching around. And then we look at personality, individual differences and intelligence. So looking at some key characteristics that might influence how we might work within a psychotherapeutic environment, in a mental health context, in terms of the specialised modules we have our approaches to mental health psychology is the first, first of the specialised modules, and that's really focused on theories of psychopathology, the challenges that we might face in terms of experiencing mental health problems and how we might address them. I'm particularly trying to look at that from a cross cultural and global perspective. So looking at differences in the views and theories and how mental health is viewed and treated around the world in that module as it's the first specialised module. We spend a lot of time looking at the key theoretical approaches that we might see in psychotherapy, so particularly looking at the predominant models, so things like cognitive therapies, behavior therapies, humanistic therapies, psychodynamic and systemic therapies, as the sort of key areas of intervention that we might experience in the mental health environment. And we also spend some time trying to help students develop a sensibility towards some of the ethical issues that they might encounter when working in the mental health context. So we start that process in that first specialised module. Ethics are covered in some of the earlier modules, but in this case, we're looking at that professional and practical applied ethics. In the second module, we look at psychotherapeutic interventions in a bit more depth of detail, so we're building on that knowledge of those specific therapies that we've looked at in the previous module, and we begin to look at some of the common factors that they actually share between different therapeutic techniques, so something called the common factor model, and this is really the idea that actually there are benefits to all different forms of therapy, but there are some common strands that tie them together that seem to have a particular influence on whether therapy is effective or not. One of those that we. Make a particular focus on is therapeutic relationship, the relationship between the psychotherapist and their client. So we spend a lot of time looking at that, looking at the different factors that might influence that relationship, and what kind of impact that that can have, and again, sort of thinking about some of those capabilities and qualities that are required to help foster patient safety and trust and build that relationship as professional psychologists and psychotherapists. The third specialised module we have is psychological appraisal and treatment. We really do a deeper dive there into mental health assessment methods and how we might evaluate someone's current mental state. So here we're looking at things like the mental state exam. We're looking at different techniques for formulating a problem list or a symptom list to get a sense of somebody's current presentation, but also the historical context and the other things that are going on for them that might be contributing to those issues, then reflecting really on what we do with that information and how that might feed into a plan for intervention, how we might develop a treatment plan based on what we know, and thinking about the different theoretical approaches, and how that might have an influence there and then. In the final specialised module, we take a much more focused look at one of the most commonly used therapies worldwide, cognitive behavioral therapy. I think many of your listeners has probably had some experience with that in one way or another. They'll know somebody that's had some CBT therapy. They may have tried it themselves. There are a lot of apps now that help people do some self CBT to support their well being, and it's a really commonly used therapy. So we take a look at some of the historical and conceptual developments of cognitive behavioral therapy, and then we take a really focused look in how it might be applied and the different techniques that are used in it, and how they might be used to treat a range of different mental health problems, and how effective it is at treating those different mental health problems. So we end on a really focused module, but something that I think a lot of people can really identify with and will encounter quite commonly. So it seems like a good way to tie off.

Emily Slade: No, absolutely. That makes complete sense. So in terms of practical skills that the students could be equipped with through the programme. What are we sort of looking at?

Dr Victoria Vass: Yeah, so in terms of practical skills, I suppose they really fall into two main domains. So we are a Russell Group University, and that means that we're one of the top producers of research in the UK. Because of that, we always have a strong focus on making sure our students develop good quality research skills, and we embed that throughout all of our modules and all of our programmes. So throughout every module, they will have some skills development around different research techniques. Some of those might be statistics based and looking at different forms of analysis. Some of those are qualitative at research skills, so looking more at, I suppose, words rather than numerical data, and thinking more about things like interview techniques, focus groups, what we do with our transcripts, how we analyse that kind of data, so a range of different types of research methods, in terms of that, also looking at things like The ethics process for research, but then that crossover into some of the professional skills in terms of clinical work. So looking at things like different cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, how they might be applied in different situations, looking at things like our professional ethics, working through some role play scenarios in terms of particular dilemmas that we might be presented with and how we might resolve them, and also thinking about practical skills in terms of things like psychological formulation and how we might map out some of these issues and work with those to develop an intervention plan. So we we try to cover a range of both research skills, which are highly transferable into a lot of different domains, a lot of different contexts where students end up using those and, you know, basic study skills such as, you know, writing critical evaluation as well, of course, but also those professional skills that relate directly to working in that mental health context. As we know, many of the students that come onto this programme are thinking about moving into working in mental health, and at times, you know, we also have a number of students that already work in mental health in one way or another, and really want to look at taking a taking a deeper dive and learning a bit more around it to support their work absolutely.

Emily Slade: So what makes this course unique? Why should they come and study here with this MSc?

Dr Victoria Vass: I think there's a few different things. We're fully asynchronous and online, and that means that if you're somebody who has a family, who has care commitments, who is working full time, this is still something that you can do for yourself. In your own time. You're not required to attend live lectures. You're not required to be online and working on something at a particular time. You have deadlines, but you know them in advance, and you can fit your studies around how you need to, how you need to be able to study, to be able to get it done. Actually, for that reason, you know, we have a lot of people from a range of different diverse backgrounds. It's a very diverse cohort of students as well as students studying from all over the world. We have people from really different backgrounds, some people who are in full time work, some people who are full time carers, some people with physical difficulties or disabilities, and these are, this is a way of learning that is much more accessible to many people. So I think that's a real strength of the programme. The fact that we're a Russell Group University means that the content that we've produced is research connected. It's research driven. We're using the findings from the research literature that are recent and relevant, and that's what we're interested in. We don't want to teach you theory from 50 years ago and not tell you what's at the cutting edge today. And the beauty of the online programmes means that we can continually update that in a way that on campus programmes can't. So I would say that's a really key strength of it. In addition to that, it means that you have people who are active researchers and active clinicians in the field, who are developing this content, who are developing the learning materials. Some of our modules on this programme have been developed by clinical psychologists working in the field, by mental health researchers currently working in the field. And that brings a different element to the materials that we're presenting you with, and I think that those are some real strengths of our programme, as well as the wonderful support that we have, the wraparound support. You know, we we get a lot of really positive feedback about our student support services and our staff on the programmes, because they're people that are really genuinely invested and interested in mental health and in supporting these programmes. So yeah, I think, I think there are a lot of reasons. I hope there are a lot of reasons that people would want to come and study on these programmes with us.

Emily Slade: Fantastic. How does the programme support students future careers and their employability?

Dr Victoria Vass: So as I said, we've got a lot of students that are already working in the mental health context, and for them, it's really about advancing their knowledge, so perhaps developing some additional skills that they haven't had the opportunity to develop in their current roles, particularly around some of those research and transferable skills. So those more academic skills, particularly perhaps if they are thinking about going on to do further study beyond this. So for some of our alumni, and we know that they move on to doing PhD or to moving into some of the professional pathways within psychology, perhaps they want to become clinical psychologists, for example. So for them, a lot of it's around developing those academic skills and study skills, but they would prefer a focus on mental health to keep it aligned to their interests. For other students, they're really coming at it more from the perspective of considering whether they would like to work in mental health in the future. They may have had personal experiences of mental health problems themselves or friends and family, and they like to learn more about it and understand it potentially, with a view to working in the field in the future. For them, it's really about helping them get focused and specialised knowledge around mental health, perhaps being able to reflect and understand some of their experiences, of what they might have experienced in different mental health contexts, but also looking at some of the practical and professional skills and ethical responsibilities that practicing psychotherapists and psychologists will engage with so thinking more about some of those skills around assessment, formulation and delivering treatments. So really it depends on the different students and what it is that they hope to get out to the programme, but we also have a range of broader career support, beyond the specifics in terms of the teaching on the programme, we also have a careers hub with an awful lot of resources to help students develop their CVs, develop applications, look for work experience, and of course, we also highlight the transferable skills that students are developing on each module so that they're able to identify what it is that they're learning and how it might help them in the future. So we do try through a range of different approaches to help develop skills. And of course, students do often get in touch with various members of staff when they need specific help, potentially with with applications, potentially with making decisions about their careers. So that's something that a lot of our lecturers and programme leads, like Sarah, for example, are happy to provide.

Emily Slade: You've briefly touched on it before, but how does the programme address ethical concerns in mental health, and how does it contribute to the global understanding of mental health psychology?

Dr Victoria Vass: in. Terms of the ethical concerns. It's a key responsibility as a psychologist or a psychotherapist, for anybody really that's working in the mental health context. We're working with vulnerable populations. So it's really important that there's a really solid understanding of the ethical responsibilities. We talk a lot about common issues that might be encountered in psychotherapy, things like transference and countertransference. We talk a lot about the power dynamics in the relationship between a client and the therapist, and so there's a lot of considerations like that, as well as thinking about the ethics of working in the academic context as well. You know how that how we have a responsibility in terms of using evidence based practice, how we have responsibilities in terms of how we present ourselves, our knowledge and our skills, even on a basic level, as psychologists, you know, we have to be very aware that when people ask us for advice, they ask it thinking that we have particular knowledge to support and help them, even in a casual sense, between friends and family, and so we have ethical responsibilities when we're giving advice, when we're actually working in research, when we're working within mental health settings. And there are a lot of different challenges that people come to face and a lot of different ethical dilemmas that people come to face in those different settings, in terms of the global understanding of mental health, our students really benefit from the fact that we have a very multicultural and diverse student body. We have students on the online programme studying from over 100 different countries across the world, across our different programmes, and that makes it a very rich and exciting environment to learn in, where people are sharing their different experiences, their different cultural backgrounds, and their different understandings of mental health and the other subjects that We cover on the programme. So we always have opportunity on each module for discussion between students. We have discussion forums in each module to help encourage that peer to peer learning and sharing of experiences. We often build in the cultural elements into assessments to ask people to reflect on their personal cultural context and think about how they might have an influence in terms of how they perceive mental health and treatment, but also, you know, where there may be differences in terms of access to mental health and treatment, thinking about countries that are more deprived and maybe don't have the same access, and how we might utilise different resources and provide different forms of intervention to support access and increase accessibility to mental health care. So we look at it from a range of different perspectives. Another important aspect of that from our perspective is utilising theory and research that comes from different parts of the world. That we're not just relying on a West dominated perspective, but we're actually trying to bring in theory and knowledge from other parts of the world too. So there's lots of ways in which we try to encourage that, and that sort of global citizenship has been a strong tenet of learning at Liverpool for a really long time. So it's something that's very much embedded into our programmes,

Emily Slade: Who is the ideal candidate for these programmes?

Dr Sarah Thurgood: Ah, so that's over to me. Then I'd say that it really is important for somebody to have passion about mental health and psychology and their desire to improve their own knowledge and further their career in this area. So as it's already mentioned earlier, quite often people want to study this because they've, they've worked somewhere in healthcare, maybe, or an organisation that's touched on mental health things. So for example, had people that said they were a workplace coach in a sort of, more of an organisational setting, but that really gave them interest in wanting to expand their knowledge on mental health issues and get some formalised training. So could be somebody with a passion for mental health, like I said, or somebody that's working in an area that sort of touches on it, but they want to go further into that and explore that, and potentially move into a mental health based role in the future. We often have a lot of students who have experience of their own mental health issues or a close family member or friend, and they really want to understand what goes on behind the in the brain and the makeup of the body that might be encouraging mental health or situational type of mental health issues. So there's lots of different people that come with that kind of interest as well. So it's driven by a personal interest in mental health and and that's that's fine too when, because, again, it can drive passion for wanting to get answers and find out what's going on in the field of mental health, and often people that have experienced their own mental health issues, they do want to then support other people. So like Victoria mentioned earlier, getting that ethical knowledge of how to deal with people and how to answer questions about mental health is. A really good thing that they can get through doing a formal professional course like this one at masters level. So, so yeah, I think that it would really appeal to a lot of different people with professional or personal interests in mental health psychology.

Emily Slade: Yeah, definitely.

Dr Victoria Vass: I think one of the important things to say about it is that there's no onus on students to have any sort of psychology background before coming onto the programme, although it's Masters level, because we cover those core areas, we make sure that students will have a solid grounding before moving on to those specialised modules. So you know, we have students with all sorts of different backgrounds, some students that have been to university before. Some students that haven't been to university before and maybe are coming in with workplace experience instead.

Emily Slade: 100% that's fantastic. So in terms of the types of careers that these students are then going to pursue, what are we looking at?

Dr Sarah Thurgood: When I speak to students, they've got lots of different desires at the their end goal. So some people want to just get an understanding of mental health psychology, and that's absolutely fine. They can do that through this course. And then, like Victoria touched on earlier, some people are actually trying to use this course as a stepping stone to maybe get on to another type of pathway, like the clinical psychology pathways, or they might want to do something more down the psychotherapeutic or counseling type routes as well, and this shows that they've accomplished a level of training or teaching at a master's level, which sometimes allows them to move forward. Some of our students actually want to do PhDs and go into the research area to find out more about these issues and how we can build better interventions or treatments or therapies. So there's lots of different things, I think that students come to this course wanting to do, but they can move into other into a variety of mental health related roles Victoria touched on earlier that there's lots of transferable skills from these courses. So things like evaluation skills, data analysis skills, both in the numbers and the the word type analysis that Victoria mentioned, but things like report writing, as well as things like building and using evidence based practice, these are all things that are really valuable to the mental health workforce. So I think that these, these are what the workforces are looking for, these type of skills, and that's why we teach them on this course. We also do the research and ethics type training, and that can have a strong application to a lot of different types of role, roles, even if they decided they didn't want a psychology role necessarily. Having those type of skills that I've mentioned there could be applicable to lots of different types of work and a number of different workplaces as well. But because mental health is such a common issue nowadays, I think that having that knowledge is really desirable by a lot of employers. Like I mentioned, somebody came as like a workplace mentor. So having that background to do that kind of role within the workplace is something that this could really support, as well as people working in maybe HR, or some of the other types of people based roles and having a strong knowledge of the issues surrounding mental health, but the core psychology foundation modules that we provide can also support with that. So I think it's really attractive to the workforce, but I think students that come to study on this course could use their skills in a variety of different ways actually, and I think they get lots out of it that they could practically apply in the future.

Emily Slade: We've briefly touched on it before, but how does the programme accommodate international students and those from diverse academic backgrounds?

Dr Sarah Thurgood: Yeah, yeah. So I think Victoria mentioned this a bit earlier, so I'll just add what I can to it, but, but the programme really is designed to support students from a variety of backgrounds. So it's not just that our students come from those backgrounds. We actually design it with those kind of factors in in mind. So the course is fully online, so location isn't an issue for us, so you wouldn't have to struggle to get to a campus and things like that, which is it can be an issue for people like who have families or caring commitments are working, because, you know, you can't always go into University on a set day if you're working. But also, if there's if you've got a health condition and things like that, that might be a barrier to get into a campus space. We don't have that issue because it's all based online. Victoria mentioned earlier about the course being asynchronous, and basically that means that we don't run live elements to our teaching, so there's not a lecture at a certain time. Don't have to attend seminar at a certain time and get sort of registration marks for attendance, things like that. All our materials are online all the time, so students from any time zone across the world can actually log on when it's suitable for them and have a look at all the materials there. So it means that it's very equitable. Everybody's getting the same opportunity. It's not that people who attended a live session were able to get extra information that doesn't exist for us. Everybody gets the same. Same information, and it's on the Virtual Learning Environment at all times. So I think that's a really, really good way that we can accommodate international students, but also lots of different types of students as well. So we do have a variety of teaching methods online as well, and those also suit different learning styles and needs. So we have different assessments, different learning styles, written assessments, online presentations. And they're even running such a way that if students don't feel confident presenting live, we can do that in a different way so that students don't have to do some of the things that they're not comfortable with. We do have discussion forums so students can meet each other online. But one of the main things that we do to try to make sure that we accommodate all different needs and backgrounds is we provide timely, tailored feedback to all our students. So we generally try to aim to give feedback within seven days, and that's tailored specifically to that students work, so you don't get this sort of copy and paste feedback style. We're asking our lecturers to really take time over that individual student and pick out features that they can improve, and pick out features where they're doing really well, so that they can apply that for the future. So having that sort of tailored approach to individual students is also another way that we can accommodate people from different backgrounds, different cultures and different international students as well. And also it's key to say that we don't have any exam condition assessments. So if people don't like exams, our approach all assessment based. So there'll be a number of small assessments that add up to your full module credit. But we don't have any exams where you have to sort of time yourself and have exam conditions and things like that. So I think that's a real plus point for people who don't like study in that way. So there's lots of things we can do to support students and accommodate International and diverse backgrounds.

Emily Slade: How are students supported throughout the programme, both academically and personally?

Dr Sarah Thurgood: In terms of the support that we have for the students, we do have numerous types of support for our students, actually, and it comes across things like academic support. So we have people like myself, the programme director, who are managing the day to day operations of the programmes. We have roles like Victoria, who are the director of studies, managing our academic quality and our curriculum to make sure that it's as best as it can be, but we have the lecturers who students deal with day to day, so they'll be sort of the face of the modules and the people to go to for questions about the materials and also the feedback, like I mentioned earlier. So they're really key, because they're sort of there day to day with the student taking them through the journey. We also have two programme coordinators who support the day to day operations, but they also are there to answer queries and questions and issues and things from the students. They also support our lecturers with students as well. So sometimes students go to them with a question that they're not sure of. So Lydia and Eleanor are actually there to help support the lecturers and answer those type of day to day questions. We also have a large dissertation team, and they're there to give guidance and support when the students are conducting their final piece of research. And they're there with their academic background experience of different research methods and topics and how to guide around the ethical considerations that can sometimes come up when we are conducting the research. So that's sort of like a summary of the academic type of support that we have. But we also have a psychology student support team, and they can deal with any issues that you're experiencing, really. So they triage the issues via email, usually, and they send those queries out to the correct team. So it could be a learning technology team there's an issue with the virtual learning environment, or it might be the students having an issue with their study plan, or an experience outside of study, and that's impacting on their performance when studying. So they're there to support with things like extenuating circumstances, work that's been submitted late, and any other course concerns, but they're there all the time to support with anything really. So they're a great person to go to if you've got any type of queries. We also have a dedicated disabilities team, and they provide support to students who come to the programme with additional support needs, and they help to put reasonable adjustment plans in place so that the student can get the best out of their study experience. And there's lots of different things we can do to support students and the disabilities team work one to one with the student to identify adjustments that are personal to them. So it's not like a one size fits all they do try to tailor that approach to each individual student. The other really great team that we have is the study skills team, and they're there really to provide some academic support, but they support with things like academic writing skills, referencing paraphrasing skills. Skills, but that support is for all students. It's international students across the across the world. Anybody can access this. It's not about English language, but they can support with English language skills as well. But I always say it's more about learning the academic language. So that cuts across everybody, really, because that can be a new language to everybody learning how to write that way. So there's loads of support sessions that they run on different topics as well. So students can tap into those, but they can also book one to one sessions as well. So there's, there's so many different support functions that I've not even mentioned, like learning technologies, the part that we have that help us to create the excellent lecture casts and online materials that we have for the students, and we have an excellent admissions team that take the student right through to enrollment and starting on the first day of the programme. So there's lots and lots of people there to support people in the in the background, but there's also the university type support services as well that are available to the online students as much as they are the campus based students. So there's a large library team with people providing statistics support, guidance on how to use the library, maybe how to do a literature search, and lots of different library based skills. And they also do a lot of sessions, group sessions, but they can book one to one with postgraduate students who are experts in different things. You can book a session with people to go through a stats issue or things like that. And our students absolutely love it. They really love that extra sort of one to one support. So there's there's so much support, but it's just our job is to make sure students are aware of all the different support that there is and that so that it's easy for them to access.

Emily Slade: Could you explain how the online induction module helps new students transition into the programme?

Dr Sarah Thurgood: Yeah, of course. So all of our students complete a two week induction before starting on any of their main modules. So here we sort of welcome the students to their programme that gives them information about the programme structure, the modules they're going to be studying. But really, we're trying to introduce them to this potentially new way of studying, which is navigating the Virtual Learning Environment, studying online, that kind of thing. It's, it's key, really, to allow people to have that two weeks, because quite a lot of people are either returning to study or they've never studied online before. So we're giving people two weeks to sort of navigate their virtual learning environment and find their feet with things before then starting on the modules where they're credit bearing. So it it looks at things like refreshing skills in academic writing, referencing, time management type skills, which are all key for getting back up and running with with studying. But we also discuss things like what the expectations are at master's level, because if people have done an undergraduate degree, they might not know what we're expecting now at master's level. So we do some sessions and run some information on what we expect at masters level, what, how that all steps up a notch, and what we're trying to do with their skills at masters level. So the induction does have a brief assessment, but it's not marked or graded as in to get credit, but what it does offer is the opportunity to practice those skills that they've learned over the first two weeks and gain some feedback from their lecturer before going into their first main module. So they've really had an opportunity there to practice all those sort of academic skills that they might not have done for some time, and then get a little bit of a practice of writing an assessment, it's just a short piece, gain some real tailored advice that they can take with them then into their first module.

Emily Slade: That's such a good idea.

Dr Sarah Thurgood: It's really great. And we also run a welcome session in the first two weeks, an academic session. So myself, Victoria and the programme coordinators all attend that session. We give some information out, but then we leave a lot of time for questions, so that the students can come with their sort of burning questions or things that they're concerned about, and we can, we can answer those live in a welcome session.

Emily Slade: Do the students eventually go to a live graduation ceremony? Or is even graduation online?

Dr Victoria Vass: Yeah they do actually, we have the, we have the live graduation ceremony, the graduation and the degree certificates are no different to those that the students have on campus. So it's always in Liverpool. It's often the Philharmonic Hall or one of the cathedrals, and it's a really nice day, and it's actually really fantastic. It's one of those where we have a we have a reception with a few drinks and so on with the department, with the on campus and the online students. And it's always really wonderful to meet these students from all over the world that have traveled to come to their graduation with their families, often quite emotional, because some of them have been in classes together, and they live in very, very different places, and it's the first time they've been able to meet face. Face, so it's always a really good day. Yeah, and it's also a nice opportunity, because we have awards that we give out each year. So we have a Student of the Year Award for the highest performing student on the programme each year, and also our dissertation of the Year award. I didn't talk about it earlier, but the dissertation module is the sort of the culmination of the programme. For students that take the full master's programme, some students stop at the postgraduate diploma level, so they just take the taught modules and choose not to do the dissertation. But those that do the full Masters have the opportunity to carry out an independent piece of research. So they'll have a one to one supervisor for their dissertation. They'll choose an area of mental health, psychology that's of particular interest to them, and design a study. Right from that initiation point, you know that initial idea, designing it, putting together a proposal, getting feedback on that, taking it through to ethics, getting ethical approval, recruiting their participants, collecting their data, writing it up. And actually, you know, we have some fantastic success stories from that. One of one of my own students has got some wonderful news today that their dissertation work's just been published in a peer reviewed journal. So, I mean, you know, we get some, we get some really fantastic pieces of work, and it's a great opportunity for publication for students that are interested in doing that.

Emily Slade: Yeah, brilliant. So how does the Virtual Learning Environment facilitate learning and interaction?

Dr Sarah Thurgood: So there's lots of different ways, actually, that the Virtual Learning Environment fertility, it's learning and interaction. So firstly, we have weekly lecture casts, and they're in the module, as I mentioned earlier, that's all on the virtual learning environment, so students can access that at any time, and they can work through those materials at their own pace. So this is made up of videos, audio, quizzes and tasks to help the student engage with the learning materials. We also provide reading lists so that the students can have some set reading to look at, but we're very clear in which of those are required and which are optional, because we know that our students don't always have loads of time to study. So we do little things like that to just help people to prioritise their reading. We also provide links to the reading in the library through a system called Talis, and basically what this does is it organises and categorises all the reading into module format, and then the students can basically put the module ID in, and it will pull up all the reading for that module. So some of our students, and I do get this question, can I have the reading for my next module? I want to get started, and I want to, like, organise myself and say, Yeah, of course, just go to tallis and put your module ID in, and it'll show you the reading for that module. And that's available all the way through the course. So even at, you know, module one, if they wanted to look at the reading in a module later on, they can actually do that with some of the technology that we've got built into the virtual learning environment. So that's makes it easy for the students. It it's there, and the links go straight through, so they don't have to spend a lot of time searching for references themselves or trying to work out and which journal it is and going through the back way we we make all that easy, and it's already there for you. In in set reading lists, we have discussion forum assessments, and we planned the module so that there's about one discussion forum in each of the modules, so that there's that opportunity to engage with the lecturer and the students like Victoria mentioned, the students are multi multinational and global, so you're interacting with students from across the globe, really, and having those discussions about mental health issues with a range of different students from from different backgrounds. So I think that really does build in that interaction, that global experience, that building of mental health knowledge from from lots of different angles and but as I mentioned earlier, we are really active with our feedback and apply those feedback points to the module. So I pride myself in being very responsive to student and lecturer feedback. So if a student does happen to say to us all there was a broken link, or the reading wasn't available, or I didn't really understand that question. We actually take that seriously, and we go in and have a look and see how we can improve those things. I think Victoria said it can be quite different to a campus space that sometimes refresh things, maybe once a year we can we can do things like that within the click of a button. Some things take us longer. Some things take further approvals. But if it's something that we can change quickly, we change it quickly. So it means that things are up to date. Things are working. If students identify things, we take that seriously, and we really want to make the programme the best. So I encourage feedback from the students. I want them to tell us if there's a problem, and the same with the lecturers, if they get a lot of feedback from a student. And our cohort that said, Oh, the students didn't really understand that question. We go in and we have a look at the wording, we make sure it meets the learning outcomes and that it's understandable by the students. So there's, there's really lots of different things that we do to facilitate learning and interaction, and some of the key things to say is about things like the module length. So the modules are all eight weeks long, other than the dissertation, which is longer, that's actually 40 weeks. But we cap the classes at 20 as well, so that there is that interaction in the discussions, and so that the lecturer can spend time with each of the students across the module, so there's not loads and loads of students that they need to fit in. They've just got to manage the 20 students. And if we get more than 20 students needing that module, we actually open a new class. So sometimes we have five or six cohorts of the same module running at one time to maintain that level of class size. And I think that's really good because it means our lecturers can focus on the feedback I mentioned earlier, that tailored, really rich feedback that the students get around their improvements and what they're doing well. And if we had too many students, they wouldn't be able to give that high quality feedback that we're looking for. So that's that's something that I think is facilitated by that managed workload that our lecturers have. The modules really do take you through the content week by week, and tell you what you need to be focusing on that week. We also have a deadline Details page which links to all the assessment pages and the assessment pages then have like the word count, the deadlines, the information about what you need to do, any key things that you need to add into your piece of work, any extra reading that you might need to do for that piece of work. So that's all there to help to keep students to keep on top of their submissions and to be really aware of what they need to do for that piece of work. We have a lecturer office which allows the students to learn more about their lecturer. So there's a bio on there, a picture of their lecturer, so they can get to know who it is that they're talking to. There's a live Q&A page, which is like an online discussion rather than a live seminar, but it's live so that students can actually post messages on there to the lecturer, but they can see each other's responses, so it adds in that peer element of learning. Because a student, for example, had an issue on using something on Mac but another student had solved it, and they were able to share the solution with each other before the lecturer could even get to the question. So it's a really good way of allowing the students to have that interaction, but the lecturer can keep an oversight of the type of queries the students are having. You can also contact the lecturer through different forms as well as that Q&A. So we have a Zoom Room that they can meet one to one or in small groups. They can send emails, and we have dedicated office hours throughout the week. But I know that our lecturers do flex that as well to meet different time zones so a student can't meet that particular office hour. We can amend that time for students to meet at a different time to make sure they do get that one to one live time with their lecturer. And also we provide things like a module Resources page, so that's often personalised to that particular module. So for instance, for instance, in some of our data analysis modules, we've got some videos and extra resources to do data analysis, and so additional resources. But then, in most of the modules, we have guidance documents around what's in the module, marking criteria, access to the reading list. They're sort of a standard, but we do try to personalise those module resources, pages with extra information depending on what we know the students might need in that module. So I really do think there's a lot of different ways that we facilitate learning, but also encourage that interaction between the lecturer the students, and also the students to student as well. So I'm hoping that students enjoy that sort of interaction and learning that we can offer online.

Emily Slade: Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you. This has been a really in depth, valuable look into the course. If people do want to find out more, if they want to start applying, is there places that they can go?

Dr Sarah Thurgood: Yeah, so I would say that the most up to date information on the course would be on our website, so we can share the link to the website, but on there, you can do things like download a prospectus, find out more about the course and the specific modules as well. So it gives you a little bit of an overview of each of the modules on the programme. You can have a look at things like the entry requirements, the fee structures and funding options. We also have a section on there about our teaching and learning methods, so you can find out a little bit more. About that. Recently, we've had a webinar put up on there as well, and it's actually introducing our psychology programmes in a bit more detail. So that might be something you might be interested in watching. And there's also a video on there about the University of Liverpool online, so you can have a look at the approaches to teaching and learning that the University of Liverpool online has as well. And then when you're ready, you can actually apply online as well. And when you apply, you will be matched up with one of our dedicated admissions officers, and they'll take you through the process of applying, what information you need to provide to back up your application and those kind of things. So yeah, I'd say go to our website, and you should find lots of information there on the mental health psychology course, and then when you're ready, you can apply there as well.

Emily Slade: Perfect. Well. Thank you both so so much for your time today.

Dr Sarah Thurgood: Thank you for having us.

Dr Victoria Vass: Thank you. It's been great chatting with you, Emily, thank you. Bye.

Emily Slade: Thanks again to Victoria and Sarah for their time. For more information on the course you can find a link in the show notes below. If you enjoyed the episode feel free to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify - for a full length video version of this episode check out our YouTube channel @futureyoupod. Thank you as always for listening and good luck on your journey to future you.

Notes on transcript

This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.

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