FINAL GROUP PROJECT: A WORKABLE PSYCHO-VOLUNTEER PLATFORM

 A Workable Psycho-Volunteer Platform

Where does the project come from?

The rapid economic growth in mainland China brings with it not only the fast pace of urbanization and improvement of living standard of Chinese people but also problems requiring attention from both government and the whole society. One such problem, to be more specific, is the psychological health of “empty nest elderly” who are left home alone by their children who go to work in big cities. This attracts the attention of a non-government organization specializing in volunteering organization for senior citizens. This organization eventually finds its way to offer help in this regard: to collaborate with the psychological departments of several universities to offer psychological assistance and intervention. To facilitate this progress, an online platform is developed to enable proper match between students and the elderly. 

The first part of this blog is used to introduce the general background of the two parties  and the formation of this online platform, and the later part will be devoted to the explanation of how the virtual collaboration adds value to each party involved, whether the platform sustainable, and the constraints under different contexts. 

General background of entities

It would be helpful to know some details of the collaborating parties in order to understand the extent of synergy which can be achieve. The non-government non-profit organization is named Senior Citizen Caring Center (abbreviated as SCCC) while the other side of collaboration involves several parties. They are psychological departments of several renowned universities. More details of background information are given as below.

SCCC, established in 2000 and located in Beijing, specializes in organizing volunteers to provide various services to senior citizens in the urban area of Beijing. It has stable number of volunteers from all works of life and can cover most areas of service except some requiring quite special and extended knowledge, such as legal and psychological disciplines.

The psychological department of university, on the other side, has a great number of students in their 3^rd or 4^th year of college or at the graduate stage. They are longing for opportunities to practice the mastered concepts and principles but are found rarely accepted as interns by professional psychological companies due to lack of practical experience.

Formation of the virtual platform

The problem of lacking professional volunteers in psychological discipline becomes more evident in year 2012 when SCCC started organizing volunteers to go to rural districts surrounding Beijing where there are a lot of empty-nest elderly whose children are away from them for most of the time in a year. It found that most of these old people have psychological problems to a certain degree and some are at serious level. Therefore, on a psychological forum, the Secretary-General of SCCC took the initiative to approach some deans of psychology faculties, and after exchange of each other’s problems and some preliminary discussion, they decided to initiate a program with an online platform to solve each other’s challenges. 

The virtual platform

The online platform is a website named “www.hafee.org” and a virtual community for gathering professional volunteers in psychological discipline to help major symptoms of old people with psychological problems online. The name “HAFEE” stands for Holistic Aids for Empty-nest Elders which has a broader room for long-run development with more comprehensive aids. The design concept of the platform is that SCCC provides major symptoms of old people with psychological problems online, while the universities motivate students from psychological department in an offline manner to apply for volunteer positions online through this website. Then SCCC can conduct review, selection and orientation for those applicants offline, too. Major functions of the virtual platform are shown as follows:

• Online Album
  As it is a virtual community, the website provided Online Album to share happiness of helping elders. Community member are free to create their own Albums. They can choose those pictures / photos that they want to share and upload to the Online Album. With the support of this Online Album, this can improve the sense of belonging of community members.

• Instant message
  Instant message function allows members to add / invite other members to become friends. Once members add a friend on their friend list, he /she can see their friend on the website or not and can chat with their as well. The Instant Message function also supports chat room function. Community member can create chat room for those friends who online. With this function, this can keep member stay at the website and bring more people to this website as well.

• Forum section
  Online forum provide a platform where community members can share volunteering stories and experiences. SCCC can provide information for latest activities, show latest Elders cases to student to attract them to apply for volunteer works. Professional from Department of Psychology of universities can provide psychological theories to help student to solve their cases. The form will keep track of those hottest keywords and topics. Those hottest keywords and topics will be shown on the index pages of the forum. So community member can view that hottest topic more easily. The forum divided community members into various user groups. Only those high ranking community members can access those psychological theories from Department of Psychology. Community members can upgrade their user group level by sharing more volunteering stories and invite more friends to join the community.Names of top ten volunteers with the highest points will be shown on the main page as well.

• Data mining function
  SCCC staff based on IT Company excels templates to upload elder’s cases to the community platform. All information on cases should be in general, like name and address should not be included in the case. So client’s privacy can be maintained. Once the cases were uploaded, the cases will be classified into difference categories, like difference age range, difference living area, difference types of psychological symptoms. Also from the student side, once they applied for community member, all information stored in the community database will classified into difference categories as well. Based on those two set of information, the data mining function can help to automatically match up students and elder which helps to reduce SCCC staff effort to pair up students. Furthermore, with the growth of community, the database will become more informative, psychological departments from universities can use those information to perform academic analysis.

How does virtual organizing add value to each party?

Our collaboration can be regarded as a strategy which has integrated two vectors/directions of virtual organizing according to Venkatraman & John’s “Real Strategies for Virtual Organizing”, namely asset configuration (virtual sourcing) and knowledge leverage (virtual expertise).

How to understand this? The special volunteers are working for SCCC to provide psychological counseling service to senior people as “independent contractors” but without payment, a special type of contracting you may assume. In this sense, they can be regarded as an outsourced unit or “special business process” which SCCC obtains to fulfill its own value-adding delivery to the society, while the volunteers themselves gain the valuable practical experience from this cooperation. Therefore, the interdependence between SCCC and the group of psychological volunteers (the tangible human

assets) can be considered to be the stage 2 of virtual sourcing, a strategy focusing on acquiring tangible and physical assets and resources from the external business networks.¹ By adopting this strategy, SCCC does not need to internally create its own position of social workers specializing in psychological counseling, thus reducing operating cost.

In addition, the collaboration between these two communities also shows the leverage of professional knowledge through the specific website. The adoption of IT networks enables SCCC to reach a boarder professional community and speed up the process of information exchange through posting psychological symptoms online and the online application function for volunteer recruiting. Professors from these universities as well as the alumina practitioners are also invited to web communities to post their opinions, comments and knowledge sharing so as to enrich the expertise of students. This in return helps to improve the quality of psychological counseling service that students will provide eventually, whereas those professors may find interesting topics or proofs for their research and the practitioners may find business opportunities. The interaction among the partners and the interdependence on each other reinforce the value of knowledge leverage in the form of virtual organizing. It’s like a special large team with team members all having complementary skills and dependent on each other if the common objective or goals is to be attained².

Sustainability of the platform and community

Although we think that the collaboration between SCCC and psychological departments of universities adds value to all parties involved, we have to consider the funding of the operation and the sustainability of the community which we will foster.

Funding will be difficult since we know that SCCC and universities are all non-profit public service entities. However, SCCC has its own official website mainly for purpose of donation marketing, thus this psychological volunteer platform can be designed as a sub-site to lower part of operation cost. Besides SCCC can also allocate a specific fund while the universities can jointly set up a “Senior Citizen Research Fund” which can contribute to afford part of operation cost as well. With all above measures, we believe that the platform will be feasible to sustain.

Another concern is how to encourage and foster an organic community on this website so as to realize the true value of the platform. To initiate the collaboration program successfully, some awareness building promotion activities will be necessary, such as display of advertising banners on the official websites of all university partners and SCCC, email notification, posts under social media accounts and flyers dissemination in the campus. In addition, students should also be educated about the benefits of the program through above mentioned channels, such as, how attending the program may help students apply what they’ve learnt and test their understanding and new ideas in the real field, a very import process of the knowledge brokering cycle³.

We think that above practices are necessary in order to make the plan work; however, thanks to the prosperity of Chinese economy in recent years and as well as the rapid development of IT technology, SCCC and universities would have enough funds and capability to execute the collaboration proposal.

Legal & Regulatory constraints

 In China, students need to obtain a national qualification certificate in psychological counseling before they can provide such service. However, students who intend to enter this industry have usually obtained the lowest level of qualification certificate before graduation. To gain higher level, they need to have 3 years of working experience before they can apply for valuation examination. This makes the working experience prior to graduation a very attractive leverage for job opportunity and further advancement. Except psychotherapy, diagnosis and treatment of mental disorder which are explicitly regulated out of the business scope of psychological counselor according to the Mental Health Law of the People’s Republic China, these counselors can provide many types of psychology-related services, such as crisis intervention, consultation on problems of everyday life, physical diseases, and other mental health related to work and family.

Since the main psychological problems of empty-nest elderlies are loneliness, anxiety, depression⁴, student volunteers with the lowest level of qualification are eligible to provide counseling services.

Conclusion

To sum up, we believe that the project proposal for the virtual collaboration between the NGO and universities is feasible and valuable in terms of solving the problems of SCCC and psychological students. Nevertheless, frequent review of the progress of the plan is required to ensure achievement of win-win outcome if the proposal is indeed adopted since conflict may be inevitable during the collaboration process due to differences in preferences, beliefs and capacities and trade-off may be necessary to create joint gain⁶. 

Reference

1. N.Venkatraman, John C. Henderson, Real Strategies for Virtual Organizing, Sloan Management Review, 1998
2. Lecture Note of High Performing Team
3. Article about Psychological counselors on http://baike.baidu.com/view/28434.htm#3
4. Andrew Hargadon & Robert I Shtton, “Builidng Innovation Factory”, Harvard Business Review 2000
5. Usual Psychological problems of Empty-nest Elderly     http://bjchs.org.cn/html/jingshenweisheng/20130201/35132.html
6. Win-Win Negotiation, Expanding the Pie

CREATIVITY IS A “PROCESS”

Creativity is a “PROCESS”

DEFINITION OF CREATIVITY & INNOVATION

Creativity is quite an abstract word and it takes some effort to understand what it means. So what is creativity? Someone thought it could be visualized like these:

  

Likewise, theoretically, Chris Stevens refers creativity to “the ability to generate and use insight”, While in a summary of scientific research into creativity Michael Mumford suggested: "…. that creativity involves the production of novel, useful products" (Mumford, 2003).^[1] Creativity can also be defined "as the process of producing something that is both original and worthwhile".^[2] To sum up, creativity has been defined as a product or process that shows a balance of originality and value, an ability to make unexpected connections and generate new and valuable ideas (Literature Review on Innovation and Creativity in E&T in EU Member States, abbreviated as LRICETEU).

Innovation is defined as the creation of new values to something that already exists. To be innovative, one is required to “pull unrelated things together” and have a wide range of interests.

When it comes to the area of education, the “process” nature of the creativity is largely emphasized as learning—the main objective of education—is a process rather than a product. Creativity does not have to mean construction of new ideas or products. Any level of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Please refers to Figure 1) except the bottom level “remembering” entails a component of creativity.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Therefore, our curriculum for teaching English as a Second Language focuses on helping Students to understand the English language, to apply the language in their lives and as additional bonus to analyze, evaluate or create new ideas if possible.

In order to achieve the above-mentioned objectives, teachers are required to be innovative in terms of pedagogy. They are encouraged to be open-minded so that they can “put unrelated things together”, to take advantage of new technologies, new social and cultural trends, and to assess students’ academic performance by valuing creativity and seeing it as an asset in the classroom

CURRICULUM

The following curriculum that we designed shall take into consideration of above pedagogical philosophy.

Teaching & Learning Activities (Learning by understanding and recreating)

In the universities in Hong Kong, a course usually spans at least one semester, requiring 12 to 13 sessions of lectures or alternative activities, one for each week. Assume that we have 13 weeks to teach this English course and the teaching and learning activities in our designed curriculum will include but are not limited to following and will be arranged in chorological order.

I.      Before the start of the first lecture, teachers will ask students to think about what they want to learn in the upcoming English classes and provide them with information on sources and methods to find a subject or topic, for example, from websites, newspapers, books or magazines, and some sample topics they may choose, such as literature, music, business, politics, or even cooking and travelling.

II.     In the first lecture, students are required to fill in a paper their suggestions on topics and the method of voting will be used to decide which three to four topics to be covered in the semester. The teacher will also introduce some technologies nowadays utilized in classroom to facilitate learning, such as online blackboard, mass-media websites, social networks, mobile communication applications.

For the following 12 weeks, teachers will allocate 3 to 4 sessions to each topic, and divide students into small groups of 3 to 4 people randomly for project-based assignments.

III.   For each topic, teachers should decide what basic grammar, functional vocabularies, phrases and sentences to be covered, and prepare and hand out a document containing such information to students. Explanation on the handouts and additional materials will also be provided to students for familiarization and understanding in the first session.

Later sessions will be used by students to communicate and discuss what they think with their peers and to deliver what they have learnt in any thinkable form through any channel.

Rules & Activities adoptable ad hoc

1. Students are required to speak English only in the classroom.

2. Students are required to prepare one story from daily life before each class, and are randomly chosen by using the method of lucky draw at the beginning of each session to tell the stories in front of the whole class. In order to put them at ease, music can be played before class begins.

3. Students are encouraged to show off their projects publicly, for example, to upload to their own web blogs if the project outcomes are in writing or video recorded, to invite their friends and parents to watch if they present in terms of role plays.

4. Outside professionals can be invited to give talks or show case. For example, if it is cooking topic, a chef can be invited to show case some dish making. 

5. In the process of doing the project students could imitate, but copy is forbited.

Assessment Tasks/Activities

Assess their attendance and participation in class (40% percent of points in final grade), the projects (60%, graded on application of contents taught, originality and value)

An Example on Topic Implementation

Take the topics of literature for example. Teachers should consider what functional grammar and vocabularies to be taught first and then disseminate materials containing such as information to students.  Traditional story books and famous movies, dramas and songs, which are worldwide known, can be provided to student as well for study and research. In the following session, students are given several reorganizational works, such as short films, dramas, screenplays, animations based on classic compositions or traditional stories, to enlighten students to start thinking completely different, and are required to engage in critical thinking and brainstorming afterward.

EAST

WEST

FAIRY TALE

Girl seated in the pumpkin coach could not be Cinderella

Then students will have opportunity to counter-argue, not only asking questions but also  responding to the other classmates’ thinking or teacher’s view.  

  

After this kind of critical thinking, discussion and debate, it is time for students to create their product. Students can choose one method to present their learning outcomes. For example, they can make short films, draft cartoons, write or perform drama, tell stories, compose songs or animations. They can use the classic compositions or famous story as background to REPRODUCE a new composition, and the mode could be recreating, continued writing, adapt, etc.

This man above must be known by everyone, but who know the guy below?

For instance, this is a classic windows xp advertisement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQT9XXw6ZnY

Students can imitate this idea and create a new ad like this video.

This is a typical creating process with learning, understanding and producing new.

EVALUATION

Increase Potential for Creativity by Providing Knowledge

Creativity has strong links with knowledge. ⁽³⁾ Although intelligence is not seemingly related to creativity, researches show that previous knowledge of one’s domain increases the potential of creative process and outcomes.⁽⁴⁾ To facilitate understanding, we can say that knowledge of domains is like the pool of tools where you can pull your tool kits out when you need to solve a problem. Therefore, it is necessary to provide students with some pre-topic documents containing basic grammars, vocabularies and relevant backgrounds, just like a baby has to gain enough vocabularies, phrases and sentences before he/she can express his/her thoughts. In addition, acquisition of know-how of creativity, i.e. knowing how to think and how to perceive things in a different way, or how to make connections, also helps the learning process. That is why in the example of topic implementation reorganization works are provided to students to show how works are reorganized in such a way that a different perspective is evident.

Increase Potential for Creativity by Spending Efforts

Creativity requires hard work as well. Working consistently with creative absorption and intrinsic motivation will increase the chance of creative learning. That’s why the students groups are formed to complete one project for each topic, and 3 to 4 projects in total. As we all know, it takes time and effort to identify the project theme, conduct research and finish the projects. Students will have to be diligent during the project period and thus raise the opportunity of creative learning.

Practice is Important

Since we have defined creativity as mainly understanding and applying what students have learnt, the story-telling at the beginning of the class will achieve this objective. In order to tell a daily life story, students need to think about what they actually want to talk and how to articulate in English. This process allows the students to go beyond notional acquisition, to use the functional words and sentences, and to exercise their thinking skills as well.

Empowerment as an enabler

The process of design a curriculum for teaching college students English is like developing a product for the consumers and the consumers now are the students, whose need is to gain ability of communication in a foreign language either in writing or speaking. To satisfy this need, we have to let students decide what they may be interested in and how they can learn the subjects actively. This relates to the topic of empowerment. Although empowering students to decide the contents and formats of teaching may involve risk against the traditional school value of standardization, empowerment will motivate students to actively participate in the teaching activities thereby are more likely to engage in creative thinking and understanding. 

Technology as an enabler for change

A little research on our consumers’ characteristics reveals that a curriculum using more technologies will be more attractive to this millennial generation who grow up with internet and mobile phones, mass-media and social networks. It is also the reason why in the designed curriculum teachers encourage students to go online for information search like Google and Yahoo, to communicate with classmates with instant message software like Skype and Wechat, to showcase project outcomes in terms of videos and writings in YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Assessment as enabler

Teaching and learning are often shaped around what is required from examinations (Scoping workshop, Wyse, 2003, NACCCE, 1999). Therefore, assessment can be used in a way to value understanding and application of what have been learnt, that is, the creativity we define. In the designed curriculum, we give 60% of the grade to the group projects, assessed on application of basic contents taught, originality and value—the main traits of a creative process or product. In addition, an active attitude toward class attendance and participation in class is also rewarded for 40% of grade since the more students who come and actively join class discussion, the more likely they would understand the contents and come up with different ideas. 

The situations, statements, individual behaviors, and team dynamics that WERE helpful in developing your product pitch

Jane

Jane took the initiative and acted as a leader in our team. During the Chinese New Year, she went through the readings and assignment requirement, summarized the main points for us. With her helped, the information within our team was become perfect. Furthermore, she has an important role on writing definition of creativity and innovation and curriculum as well.

Sophia

Sophia has very good drawing skills and can draw pictures within several minutes. She helped our team to draw a lot of cartoons during the preparation of presentations. These cartoons are very crucial for us. As human recognize images easily than word, Cartoon helped the proposed curriculum more visualize and more easily to understand. Cartoons become our symbol which helps our audiences to distinguish our team and others easily.  

Chung

Chung participated in the discussion for curriculum. He brought out with the idea of making YouTube (or other online video hosting company) to let students broadcast their ideas. Also he refined the idea by letting students to records a several videos clips. For each of the video clips, students can provide difference choice for audiences to select. After Audiences made one of choice, the video clip will redirect the video clip that was selected. So that Audiences get very difference experience if they pick up different choice between different endings. This inspiration helped our team to think of more ideas and further changed to boarder approaches, such as blogs.

The situations, statements, individual behaviors, and team dynamics that were NOT helpful in developing your product pitch.

Discussion of curriculum

During the discussion of curriculum, there was some conflict within our group. The conflict happened when we were discussing the curriculum detail. Sophia brought out the idea of defining the definition of creative first rather than writing on the detail of curriculum first. Jane and Chung both agreed that it could be writing on the detail of curriculum first. The argument lasted for almost 1 hour. This made our team relationship more badly and we all felt tried in the argument. Finally, Jane came out of an idea to let Sophia think of the detail of curriculum first and settled the problem.

Explain and analyze how your collaboration, exchanges, and interactions with your concerned stakeholders have shaped your circular innovation.

Our stakeholders (Group 8) acted as parents. After they listened to our presentation, they thought that our idea was not enough coverage on delivering English Grammar to students and they thought that curriculum should able to provide English grammar, English usage to students, not just let student to do what they want to do.

In order to satisfy parents’ demand, we modified our curriculum with more teaching materials from teachers before the beginning of the course. Also, teacher will decide what basic grammar, functional vocabularies, phrases and sentences to be covered. With the above solution, we can guarantee students can gain useful English Grammar and lead them to explore more on their interested ideas in English.

If there was no stakeholder involved our circular innovation, our curriculum may focus on student side rather than practical use. With their help, our team can understand more about the aspect from parents and improve our curriculum design.

Reference

1.     Mumford, M. D. (2003). Where have we been, where are we going? Taking stock in creativity research. Creativity Research Journal, 15, 107–120.

2.    (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999, 2000; Lubart & Mouchiroud, 2003; Runco, 1997, 2000; Sternberg & Lubart, 1996)
3.  Literature Review on Innovation and Creativity in E&T in EU Member States
4.  Literature Review on Innovation and Creativity in E&T in EU Member States