Having worked remotely as a team, online, for over decade (and built and taught courses online for over 7-years) through periods of stress, illness and recovery, our team has learned the importance of incorporating healthy screen breaks and balance into our work days through taking mindfulness and exercise breaks in our day. This need was highlighted when our team lead acquired a long term concussion while at the same time studying online. It became evident quickly that those screen breaks were not just healthy, but necessary.

The latter experience shone a spotlight for our team on the need in teaching digital skills in an online course, that we should similarly be demonstrating for our students how to keep themselves healthy in an online study and work environment. As such, we started to build real world activity breaks into the Units of our online courses.

Fast forward to the pandemic and the real reality of seeing people across the globe spirally out of control with anxiety and stress with working, teaching, and learning remotely for the first time with none of the skills in how to manage that – logistically or in terms of their health. Seeing a need that we had a solution for, we began to share the resources we’d built for screen breaks, as well as create some resources on teaching mindfulness and relaxation techniques to kids.

It is these asynchronous open educational resources that we will be sharing in this session, along with how we incorporate mindfulness, exercise, and healthy screen breaks into our live online, full day, kids camps. Many of the activities that we will be sharing we have made freely and openly accessible through the OER World Map, MERLOT, and the OER Commons.