Digital library. Our new image-led collection of multimedia resources provides easy access to episodes and transcripts from our podcast series ‘Hormones: The Inside Story’. The excellent 2020 Student Video Award winners and our own ‘What is endocrinology?’ videos are now easy to find and the collections are ready to be expanded.
Curriculum topics: all relevant curriculum resources are now categorised by topic and age.
Resource filtering: in addition to student age and curriculum topic, results can be filtered by content category and type of resource, to further enhance the site’s usability.
Glossary: new behind-the-scenes features simplify navigation of the site. Search function adjustment now allows misspellings and non-exact phrasing to return the correct results. ‘Popover’ glossary summaries on keywords in articles aid comprehension without interrupting the readers’ flow. Site functionality has been optimised for speed, mobile phone viewing and search engine rankings.
The Society’s public-facing educational resource, You & Your Hormones, has been awarded an Association for Science Education (ASE) Green Tick. This certification means that You & Your Hormones will now be promoted as an ASE-evaluated resource that can support learning about hormones in schools.
BUILDING ON SUCCESS
Since its launch in 2011, You & Your Hormones has always aimed to provide the latest information on hormones and hormone-related conditions to the general public, including patients and students. Back in 2015, the site averaged just over 25,000 visitors per month. This has since exploded to over 112,000 users per month in 2019 and over 2.7 million page views in 2020. Its excellent search engine index ranking means most visitors arrive via search engines when researching hormones or endocrine-related topics.
This fantastic progress aligns with our charitable aim of engaging the public with endocrinology and its impact. It shows great momentum in the fight against the plethora of hormone misinformation that can be found online.
TARGETING SCHOOLS
An entire section of the site is dedicated to students and teachers. These are key audiences, but our access to them is limited through our established communication channels. As part of the Society’s continuing mission to promote accurate knowledge about hormones, our Public Engagement Committee and the You & Your Hormones Editorial Board have been working hard towards improving the website’s appeal as an educational resource for schools. This has culminated in several facelifts to the site (see panels), and has driven the creation and curation of more engaging and digestible digital resources to help meet the criteria of the ASE Green Tick Certification Scheme. These updates have produced a more easily searchable, smoothly navigable, mobile-friendly, image-driven website for school teachers and students.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
The ASE Green Tick Certification allows us to refocus the delivery of our existing content and contribute to the overarching mission to increase engagement with school teachers and school children. It positions the site as a tool for understanding hormone science. You & Your Hormones’ huge amount of valuable, expert information is now easier to access, with curriculum-relevant pages and resources now clearly tagged to increase usability for teachers and students.
Of course, this is a work in progress, and our future plans intend to expand upon the range of multimedia resources, educational tools and up-to-date information on hormones and hormone health.
As Society members, please encourage your colleagues, friends and school contacts to use the site as their first port of call for authoritative, expert and engaging information about hormones. And, if you have any resources that could be used to teach students about hormones, have any feedback for the Editorial Board, or would like to join the team as a content editor, please contact [email protected]
YOU & YOUR HORMONES EDITORIAL BOARD
DR MILES LEVY Editor-in-Chief (Leicester)
DR ALI ABBARA (London)
PROFESSOR STEPHANIE BALDEWEG (London)
DR CHIOMA IZZI-ENGBEAYA (London)
PROFESSOR KARIM MEERAN (London)
DR FOZIA SHAHEEN (Birmingham)
Dr Matthew Simmonds (LINCOLN)
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