TeachAids Summer Fellows Initiate New CrashCourse Module
Every year, TeachAids has welcomed numerous incredible interns and fellows to our family from institutions across the world to work on some of our leading projects. This year, we had the pleasure of hosting a cohort of exceptional fellows who immersed themselves in our research and product design efforts specific to concussion education. As the summer comes to a close, we would like to acknowledge their hard work and showcase one of the many projects that they have helped initiate and contributed to greatly.
To expand our CrashCourse concussion education suite, we’re currently developing a searchable database that features hundreds of informal videos from people sharing their concussion stories. It’s our hope that these videos help destigmatize the subject and provide people with a resource so they don’t feel they are alone while dealing with this “invisible” injury. We are calling this project our StoryWall. Our fellows arrived with a diverse set of backgrounds, experiences, and interests, and each took ownership of various components of this project. They worked on various aspects ranging from need finding, to story outreach, to resource collection.
As an offshoot of the TeachAids course taught at Stanford University, Elena Mosse, Stanford ‘21, and Juliette Woodrow, Stanford ‘21, spearheaded initial need finding efforts. They surveyed youth who had been concussed and learned what types of resources and information they would find most useful in their recovery process. Their combined insights along with input from our expert medical and health specialists directly influenced the basic structure of the StoryWall project. Mosse was awarded a full-time summer fellow and worked closely with our technical experts to help coordinate story processing, recruitment and training as well as managing end-to-end quality control efforts.
Story outreach and collection was led by Anja Zehfuss, Stanford ‘20. Having experienced a concussion herself, Zehfuss was a natural at connecting with others who had experienced a concussion and making them feel comfortable sharing their video narratives. Zehfuss collected more than 250 videos throughout her tenure at TeachAids, and also co-led a team of part-time volunteers who assisted in the video collection process.
In addition to providing viewers with videos that they could relate with, we hope to provide viewers with state-of-the-art medical resources and tools that users could be referred to after interacting with the videos in StoryWall. These would include online resources, clinics, hospitals, and support groups. With skill and experience in parsing through research, Linnea Bacon, Clemson ‘20, embraced this task and initiated the accumulation of unique and credible resources for patients and their caregivers.
Bella Khuu, Stanford ‘22, supported with StoryWall outreach, as well as marketing and business development efforts for TeachAids. Throughout the summer, she worked directly with Board Members to support with the development and maintenance of key partnerships. Through her thoughtful and methodical work, she helped optimize an organizational system to allow the executive team to work seamlessly and manage the flow of complex relational information.
In addition to the core StoryWall development team, this project has truly a group effort that integrated the strengths of various TeachAids fellows. Part-time fellows Riya Goel, USC ‘22, and Kayla Magid, Stanford ‘20, also assisted with video processing and ensuring that curated videos were of the highest quality.
TeachAids is proud of all that our fellows have accomplished, and hope that their experience empowers them in their academic pursuits and beyond. We aim to launch the StoryWall in 2020 – stay tuned for further updates!