The Health Promotion Office (HPO) has recently added two new online resources for students, the Health Guru and Student Health 101.

The Health Guru is a video library on the NMU website which covers a range of different student-related health issues.

The online database contains about 1,000 videos that typically range from two to three minutes per video.
It is free of advertisements and comes at no cost to the university to gain access to it.

“Health Guru was looking to expand their video library and picked about half a dozen schools to try it out,” Lenny Shible said, Health Promotion Specialist. “We were picked by Health Guru to try out their program.”

Student Health 101 is an e-magazine that puts out a new issue every month. Each issue is 40 pages, with six of them being locally related. It is being used by more than 500 universities across the country.

According to Shible, the idea for the e-magazine came when funding was made available by the university for him and his staff to attend a nationwide health conference in Chicago, put on by the American College Health Association (ACHA).

The group spent some time at a poster session during the four-day conference.

“It was kind of like a flea market, where folks were selling products and services that were convinced this would help student’s lives,” Shible said. “Here they were selling jobs and services to explore.

“We pulled our heads together and all stumbled upon Health Guru and Student Health 101.”

When the group returned from the conference, Shible was able to get things going to institute the programs, Stephanie Stockel said Health Promotion Assistant.

They then brought the idea to the Center for Student Enrichment (CSE) who has approved the two resources. Although Health Guru happened to be a free resource for Northern, Student Health 101 cost about $7,400 to bring to campus.

Shible credited Associate Provost for Student Affairs, Bill Bernard, to getting the project on its feet. Bernard suggested HPO find partners to help fund the project.

According to Shible, Dining Services, the Health Center and Public Safety were recruited to partner with HPO and split the funding of the project.

The health, physical education and recreation department went in with the dean of professional studies for a split partnership.

“Each of the funders will get one complete page in the magazine every month,” Shible said. “We saw this as an opportunity to get a health related message out from our partners every month for the next ten months.”

On the first of each month, students will receive an email alerting them of the e-magazine. If students lose the email link, the monthly catalog can be found on the HPO website, Stockel said.

Shible went on to mention some incentives for students who participate in the e-magazine.

“Student Health 101 is giving away $1,000 every month to a student,” Shible said. “In order to be eligible for that drawing, you need to open up that email and click the 1000.

“On the local level, NMU Public Safety donated a parking pass for this month’s drawing.”

Students have access to the entire archive of Student Health 101 from 2007 when it first became available, Shible said.

The archive can be found by clicking in the upper right hand corner on the front page of the e-magazine.

For more information, the Health Guru can be accessed at www.nmu.edu/healthpromotions/healthguru and www.readsh101.com/nmu.html for Student Health 101.