Mark Wilson has been at the University of Exeter since 2006 and was appointed Professor of Performance Psychology in 2017, where he is currently the Director of Research for Sport and Health Sciences. Mark is a leading expert in visuomotor skill acquisition and has an applied and theoretical interest in understanding the influence of pressure on performance, and developing training that might mitigate against these negative effects.

Mark has published over 100 research articles and supervised 14 PhD students to completion. His applied research crosses boundaries (e.g. sport, surgery, military, clinical populations) and has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Innovate UK, The Waterloo Foundation, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Parkinson’s UK, Intuitive Surgical, and the Football Association, among others. As a chartered psychologist and registered practitioner with the Health and Care Professions Council, Mark works with his clients to help them perform at their best when it matters most.

Luciana joined Exeter in 2019 as a Lecturer in Nutrition. Before this, she completed her PhD in Nutrition and Dietetics at The University of Queensland in Australia. Her thesis discussed the development and evaluation of a diet and physical activity programme for nurses. After that, her post-doctoral training examined the effect of work patterns on energy balance and physical and mental health. Luciana is a registered nutritionist with the UK’s Association for Nutrition and her research is multi-disciplinary. Her overarching theme is how modifying diet and physical activity behaviours can promote health and prevent chronic disease; either by direct changes in diet and physical activity level or indirectly via environmental factors.

M-learning or mlearning is short for ‘mobile learning’. It is a form of distance education conducted online through mobile devices.

According to EdApp, Micro learning is the breaking down of information into topical, bite-sized chunks. By interacting with these highly-targeted learning bursts, lessons become much easier to digest and the likelihood of knowledge retention is increased. Microlearning courses are easier to develop, update and distribute compared to traditional eLearning courses and completion rates are dramatically higher. Furthermore, the compact nature of microlessons means microlearning is a great enabler of other techniques such as Peer Learning, Spaced Repetition and Just-in-Time training.

eLearning courses that employ micro-elearning typically see completion rates rise from as low as 15% to around 90% and beyond. It was first pioneered as computer-based training, but with smartphones becoming ubiquitous, going mobile has become a natural fit. There are many types of microlearning but mobile learning brings with it benefits such as push notifications for lesson reminders, cloud distribution and translation, plus the ability to deliver microlessons (that are always up to date) direct to learners' pockets.

We created this program with the intention to help healthcare workers particularly during the COVID-19 crisis but in times of high stress.