1627 We Are Donors: Redeveloping Educational Material for Schools in Response To COVID-19

Whitby, J; Doshi, P; Symington, M; Battle, J; Brathwaite-Shirley, C; Whitter, L; Adamou, C; Green, M; Critchley, A; Ehrlich, A; Byrne, M

AIM: We Are Donors is a UK registered charity aiming to increase the number of organ and blood donors across the UK through student led education at schools and universities. Over the last two years we have spoken to over 4000 students and have shown that the program improves awareness of organ donation, facilitates discussion within families and increases the number of planned organ donor registry sign ups. In response to COVID-19 our educational sessions moved online, and we studied what impact this had on engagement with the students and how our material could be redeveloped to improve outcomes. METHOD: We compared the feedback from 1514 children aged 11-18 years who received face to face presentations in August 2018 - May 2019 with that from a group of 141 children aged 14 -18 years from 5 schools who received live online sessions using the same powerpoint presentation between March 2020 - June 2020. RESULTS: The change to online delivery reduced recommendation of the talk to a friend from 88% to 69%. Moving to online sessions also resulted in reduced post session feedback. To tackle these issues, we re-developed our presentation in collaboration with Slido to feature interactive elements, a quiz (including a leaderboard) and a real-time question and answer session. We also incorporated an immediate feedback survey. CONCLUSIONS: Our study highlights new challenges that educators are facing when moving to online platforms. While moving online allows more students to be reached, maintaining high levels of student engagement is challenging.