For Organizations

Instructional design for the health networks, clinics, camps, and nonprofits already teaching people about diabetes.

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The shortage isn’t expertise.

Almost nobody teaching diabetes is short of knowledge. They are short of hours. Education has to fit the time an appointment or a single class allows, and the research is blunt about what that produces: across 118 separate interventions, the programs that actually moved A1C were the ones where people got ten contact hours or more.1 Where the contact stops, the benefit follows — it begins fading one to three months after the class ends.2

That is a limit of the format, not of the people delivering it. Building the part that comes after — practice, application, something to reinforce it months later — is instructional design work, and it takes designer hours that a clinic or a camp almost never has on staff.

So we do that part. You keep the relationships, the clinical judgment, and the credit; we bring the curriculum design behind it.

What we build with you.

  1. Sequence.

    We take what you already teach and order it so each idea rests on the one before, instead of arriving all at once. It is the oldest finding in the field and the easiest to lose when time is short.3

  2. Practice.

    Materials that put the learner to work on their own numbers rather than a worked example. Across 225 studies, doing beat listening — and the gap was widest in small groups, which is what most diabetes teaching already is.4

  3. Reinforcement.

    Something that returns weeks later, because spacing the practice out is what makes it stick.5 This is the piece a one-off class structurally cannot have, and the piece that decides whether any of it lasts.

  4. Training your educators.

    The people who teach it need to understand why it is built this way, or the design erodes the first time someone is running late. We work with your staff, not around them.

  5. Tools you can hand over.

    Our blood sugar simulators, the Lab Notes app, and our workbooks in print and online. Free for your patients and participants, with no account and nothing to buy.

Who this is for.

If part of your job is teaching people how to live with diabetes, this is for you. In practice that has meant:

  • Health networks and clinics: Diabetes educators, certified diabetes care and education specialists, and endocrinology teams who have a curriculum but no designer to develop it.
  • Diabetes camps: Where the teaching is already hands-on and the challenge is making it carry home after the week ends.
  • Nonprofits and patient organizations: Groups with a community that trusts them and material that has grown one handout at a time.
  • Clinicians building their own materials: The handouts, visuals, and explanations you have written yourself, given the structure to actually teach.

Every organization we work with reaches people we never could directly. That is the point of doing it this way rather than trying to teach everyone ourselves.

How it goes.

  1. A conversation.

    What you teach now, who you teach it to, and where it stops working. Usually half an hour is enough to know whether we can help.

  2. We look at what exists.

    Your slides, handouts, and class outlines. Most organizations have more usable material than they think, in the wrong order.

  3. We design.

    A sequence, the practice that goes with it, and the reinforcement that follows — built to your setting and your time constraints, not ours.

  4. Your team learns to run it.

    Including the reasoning, so it survives contact with a full waiting room.

  5. It is yours.

    You deliver it under your own name. We are not looking for the byline.

Let’s talk.

Tell us what you teach and where it runs out of room. If we are not the right fit we will say so, and point you at whatever is.

info@betacellfoundation.org

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Sources

  1. Chrvala CA, Sherr D, Lipman RD. Diabetes self-management education for adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus: a systematic review of the effect on glycemic control. Patient Educ Couns. 2016;99(6):926–943. doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2015.11.003
  2. Norris SL, Lau J, Smith SJ, et al. Self-management education for adults with type 2 diabetes: a meta-analysis of the effect on glycemic control. Diabetes Care. 2002;25(7):1159–1171. doi.org/10.2337/diacare.25.7.1159
  3. Wood D, Bruner JS, Ross G. The role of tutoring in problem solving. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 1976;17(2):89–100. doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1976.tb00381.x
  4. Freeman S, Eddy SL, McDonough M, et al. Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014;111(23):8410–8415. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111
  5. Cepeda NJ, Pashler H, Vul E, et al. Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis. Psychol Bull. 2006;132(3):354–380. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354