Depression affects approximately 5% of today’s teenagers. Of these, a mere 30% receive any sort of intervention or treatment, even though studies show depression can be effectively treated in adolescents. Unfortunately, many high schools do not have a formal curriculum to address depression (Johns Hopkins Medicine, Mood Disorders Center).
The Adolescent Depression Awareness Program (ADAP) at Johns Hopkins educates school-based professionals, high school students, and parents about the illness of depression. Through this work, ADAP aims to increase awareness and decrease stigma about mood disorders in young people while stressing the need for evaluation and treatment (ADAP).
Bytelion’s Solution
To support ADAP’s mission of making their curriculum available online for school-based professionals to teach in classrooms nation-wide, Bytelion implemented two integrated software solutions: a custom learning management system (LMS) to train and test future teachers online, and a beautiful marketing website to attract and grow the number of ADAP participants being trained through the LMS. We then built a custom user import integration between the website sign-up form and the LMS registration.
We leveraged WordPress to build the website and customized the software Canvas to create the ADAP training program. Canvas LMS is an open-source application written in Ruby on Rails, so we used Ruby on Rails to customize the learning experience for ADAP users. Since Canvas is open-source, it allows us to continuously iterate and improve upon it as needed. As of April 2020, we have registered 24 users through the website and onboarded them onto the LMS.
