Outdoor Learning: Boosting Student Well-being and Academic Success

Welcome to the Meratas Memo’s Weekly Roundup! This is your weekly fix of higher education and alternative financing news. Here are this week’s stories:

 

How to Extend Mental Health Services for Students

One of the many effects of the pandemic that we’ve seen is the increase in mental health challenges that students face. Typically, they could go to their college campus for support from their counseling centers. However, these counseling centers have had to turn to new avenues to reach and support their students. 

The telehealth space was already growing but has recently gained a lot of renewed interest due to the increase in demand from students and their counseling centers. Students need a way to get the mental health services they need and counseling centers need a way to reach them. Read more in this post by Inside Higher Ed about the increase in telehealth mental health services and how counseling centers and students are adapting to this new way of care. 

Read the full story on Inside Higher Ed here. 

 

The Benefits of Outdoor Learning

While distance learning has become the default choice for learning this fall, outdoor learning may provide another avenue of education this fall. 

The National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative is advocating and helping schools move more classes outdoors. This initiative was born from many of the inequalities they observed during distance learning and they’re giving schools the plans they need to implement outdoor learning. 

Read the full story on Edsurge here.

 

Some Community Colleges Made the Call Early

Community and technical colleges had a particularly difficult task in planning out their pandemic response. This is especially true of technical schools that require lab time for their students to complete their program. 
Many of these community colleges, however, planned as early as may on how they were going to run their classes in the fall. Read more in this story by Inside Higher Ed on how these schools did just that.

Read the full story on Inside Higher Ed here.