ADHD online course - free, starting now.

[chocolateygoo]

Hi,

Just wanted to highlight a course thats just starting on ADHD, might be of interest to others of you out there.

Its run via Coursera, the link is here: https://www.coursera.org/course/adhd (or google Coursera, then search for ADHD).

Basically, if you haven't come across this yet, the new 'cool thing' is for universities to offer undergraduate level courses free of charge over the internet. The phenomena is known as MOOCs if you're geeky enough to research it. Universities get publicity and reach a huge audience, typically in the order of 20,000+ students globally take each course. You get completely free training. Some courses offer a certificate at the end and varying amounts of coursework to earn it. For this one on ADHD, there's a weekly quiz that you have to score more than 90% on average in to get the certificate (you can refer to your notes and the internet though when answering it!). Or you can just watch the lectures and take what you want to from them, with no obligation.

The ADHD one looks pretty good so far, its American so the diagnosis criteria and treatment may be slightly different, but still should be relevant. I'm certain quite a lot of it is going to go over my head, but hoping to end up much more well-informed by the end of it.

Hope some of you will join me in taking it and post below what you think!

[supermumy]

Sounds like it more for students of a medical background?
Have you started the course yet?

[chocolateygoo]

Yeah just finished the first lecture. It wasn't too complicated - there was no medical language, just a few obscure references to the American diagnosis bible. It wasn't dumbed down, but it wasn't specialist either, if that makes sense? I think its aimed at a broad audience, looking at the discussion boards there are quite a few teachers and parents and adult sufferers taking the course.

It covered:

- Diagnosis: what behaviour symptoms are needed, in what severity, for how long. Presented in quite a textbooky fashion which was not so good, but very interesting to see the inattention / daydreaming aspects which I hadn't associated with ADHD before. The list of symptoms is quite useful as a reference tool if you were worried about a child.
- Prevalence: looking at how common it is in males/females, different age groups, etc. Average is 10% in males which seems so high, but not clear if genuinely less in females or just less diagnosed. Also about 50% less in adults than children - but does it go away, or is it just poorly diagnosed in adults? No variation in occurrence due to IQ or socio-economic background.
- Case studies: quite a few stories of his patients, anonymous of course! Usefully demonstrated the variety of symptoms across different ages and genders.

Anyway - so far, so good, but we'll see what the next week on genetics brings!

[Loushah]

I'll join you...really interested in this subject.


Just joined....very easy application form.

[lizduncan72]

Sounds really interesting-will have to go and investigate this!!

[The Juggler]

sounds interesting.

[lubeam]

Just joined thanks for this think ds2 has ADHD :)

[Wheelybug]

Oooh really interested in this. How long would you say you spend each week on it? Currently doing my degree so I don't have much spare time, but don't like to pass up free training / courses :)

Thanks
Cathy
Pre-school Play (http://www.pre-schoolplay.blogspot.com)

[chocolateygoo]

Cathy,

I'm spending about an hour a week on it, so its not a huge commitment. The video lecture is about 40 mins in length, then if you want to there's a few additional internet articles to browse and a quiz (optional - depends if you want a certificate at the end of the course).

You can join at any time in the course (until it ends in a couple of month's time) and still access the previous weeks' lectures and readings, however there are deadlines for the quizzes, first one is 1st April, so again it just depends if you want a certificate for it or not.

I'm getting very addicted to these online courses! So be warned, you might end up doing loads of them on all sorts of random subjects!