Case Study

Centre for Sexuality

Adapting programming to serve a larger community, including youth in rural and remote areas, and underserved populations. The Onlea team collaborated with the Centre to better understand their audience and the context for their learning.

Adapting programming to serve a larger community, including youth in rural and remote areas, and underserved populations.

Who is the Centre for Sexuality?

The Centre for Sexuality is an organization with more than 50 years of leadership on sexual health education in Calgary, Alberta. The Centre’s mandate is to teach, train, and advocate to support healthy bodies, healthy relationships, and healthy communities with a focus on inclusivity, consent, and self-determination.

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The Challenge

The Centre for Sexuality needed to redevelop the Centre’s program of school-based workshops into self-directed online courses in order to serve a larger population.

Their in-person workshops reach 10,000 students a year in the Calgary area, delivering evidence-based relationship and sexual education that is widely inclusive of different gender identities, sexualities, bodies, backgrounds, and beliefs.

With the use of new digital modalities, C4S sought to adapt its programming for online delivery to reach underserved populations, including youth in rural and remote areas.

The Onlea team collaborated with the Centre to better understand their audience and the context for their learning. Several key concerns emerged:

  • Engagement, balancing in-depth material with compelling narrative examples, developing interactive learning activities, and maintaining attention and motivation for a potential age group of 11-19;
  • Mediation, replacing a live Centre for Sexuality workshop educator with material designed to support self-directed learning while still anticipating the spontaneous needs of learners (questions, added resources, etc.);
  • Privacy, both for learners encountering sensitive material, and in terms of data protection; and
  • Accessibility, as tools would need to be usable by learners at different skill levels, and in a range of environments (teacher-supported, parent-supported, solo, remote, etc.).

Alongside the youth-focused Relationship and Sexual Health Education program, the Centre for Sexuality was also seeking guidance on selecting and deploying a learning management system (LMS) for their organization, as well as developing a series of modules for health care and social service professionals.

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Our Solution

Based on a robust curriculum and narrative outline developed by the Centre for Sexuality team, Onlea produced four courses, three for junior high (Grades 7, 8, and 9), and one for high school students, each consisting of four modules.

The program design puts emphasis on situated learning. Each module focuses on the use of narrative as a strategy for introducing concepts, connecting to real-world scenarios, building empathy, and promoting engagement in the absence of a facilitator. Onlea developed visual identities for five core characters and assorted supporting players, who grow with the learner as they age between courses and encounter more complex situations.

The learner interacts with the narratives from three different perspectives:

  • Course text in a friendly but authoritative tone that presents information, guides the learner through activities and knowledge checks, and provides judgement-free feedback and context for learning materials.
  • Comic strip-style scenes that develop narrative scenes and examples with a bright, engaging visual flair.
  • First-person scenarios that put the learner within the world of the story in the vantage point of the characters.

To help build the new program, the development team also created two short promotional videos, one in each official language.

The Results


Amazing news about this program can be found at the Centre for Sexuality website.