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The forced shift to online teaching delivery during COVID-19 suppression measures in 2020 was a complex challenge for Australian teachers. Teachers were given very little time to prepare online content and very little professional development to teach online. Their experiences prompted discussion about the abilities of pre-service teachers (PST) to adapt content to online delivery if another pandemic occurred while they were teaching in the future.

PST majoring in Health and Physical Education were required to adapt a 4-weeks high school health education unit for online delivery. This study analysed data from PST personal reflections and focus groups to gain a better understanding of their perceptions about teaching health education online and their confidence to adapt tasks and activities from face-to-face delivery or develop unique online tasks.

PST reported varied confidence and competence to plan for and engage in online health education teaching. PST were concerned about student learning and engagement online, and unsure how to best differentiate activities to ensure all student could meet the intended outcomes.

Little is known about the confidence and competence of PST to deliver fully online school health education. It is important to know more about this phenomenon to inform teacher education and teacher professional development to ensure teachers are better prepared for online delivery in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of a workplace intervention designed to interrupt prolonged occupational sitting time (POST) and its impact on the self-reported health of a cohort of desk-based employees.

In total, 43 participants received an interactive computer-based software intervention for 26 weeks. For the first 13 weeks the intervention passively prompted the participants to interrupt POST and perform brief bouts of non-purposeful movement. The second 13 weeks involved the passivity of the intervention being removed, with the intervention only accessible voluntarily by the participant. This approach was adopted to determine the sustainability of the intervention to change workplace health behaviour.

ANOVA results revealed a significant interaction between group and test occasion, F(2, 42)=2.79, p < 0.05, such that the experimental group increased their total health from pre-test to post-test (13 weeks), and to second post-test (26 weeks) with a medium effect size of Cohen’s d=0.37.

An action research approach was implemented for this study, and hence the participants were organised into one group. Based on a communitarian model, the intervention aimed to monitor how desk-based employees adapted to specific health behaviours, and therefore a control group was not included.

Passively prompting desk-based employees to interrupt POST and perform non-purposeful movement at work improved self-reported health. Participant perceptions of health were maintained following the removal of the passive feature of the intervention.

Interventions predicated on a social ecological model that modify how employees interact with the workplace environment might provide a framework for health behaviour change in populations where sitting is customary.

The passive approach used in this study removed the individual decision-making process to engage in health behaviour change, and established a sustainable effect on participant health.