A Free Digital Textbook for Massage Therapist Navigating COVID-19

Get your free copy here: https://massagemastery.online/buy-preventing-disease-transmission-textbook/ Schools can request a Group Leader role which will allow them to assign textbooks to students and track their progress.

Article by Anne E Williams

I don’t think my experience was unique when I say that I was caught off guard. One minute I was at a public lecture at a nearby university in a room full of 500 people, the next I was looking down the empty?streets of our little town that, like every other town in our state, went into lockdown.

I vividly remember – will always remember - the daze of that first week. I couldn’t take my eyes off the news. I devoured every piece of information coming from the World Health Organization (WHO), Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and news outlets. I called all my friends or they called me and we reassured each other that it was going to be okay. Inside, I didn’t feel that it was going to be okay. I was scared, especially for my parents in Washington State, an early hotspot for the U.S. outbreak.?

There was an odd quiet beauty to quarantine that I found restful and yet difficult to reconcile. I fell into a rhythm: Write in the early morning watching the sun come up with a big cup of coffee beside me. Stop at noon for some yoga and lunch. Write through the afternoon and take a hike in the evening. Watch an episode of Mad Men on Netflix with my husband, exchanging foot massage, read a little and bed.??

Outside, new life was budding in the fields and on the trees and one day I had the pleasure of watching a golden eagle swoop from its perch and sail directly over my head. My heart, raw with worry, absorbed all the beauty around me and mixed it up with the deep pain of knowing that somewhere, while I was bending down to look at a wildflower, someone was losing the person they loved to COVID and that our lives would never be quite the same again.?

COVID-19 came at a time when my life was already in a period of change. Back in 2018, my textbook publisher, Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins discontinued their massage therapy line and the rights to my textbooks (Massage Mastery: From Student to Professional and Spa Bodywork: A Guide for Massage Therapists) came back to me. But I didn’t want to hand them off to another publisher and publish in the traditional way. I’ve spent the last 20 years with a passion for instructional design and education theory. I know that traditional textbooks can’t engage people in the way I believe is important for learning. I wanted something that does everything a textbook does, but does it better – much, much better.

Unfortunately, time was not on my side. Schools who had adopted Massage Mastery and Spa Bodywork for their programs started to email me when Amazon and Barnes & Noble jacked up the price ($89-$120 per copy) for the few printed books still on the market.

My husband and partner, Eric Brown, has long been a leader in online learning in the massage profession. He moved the textbooks into an online format to give schools immediate access to this content and schools responded positively to the basic digital format.

Eric and I started to envision the possibilities. We started to dream about what digital textbooks could be. We envisioned a custom online learning platform that allowed us to use video, audio, animated features, and rich visuals. I wanted to incorporate interactive critical-thinking exercises to help people apply what they had learned in the text to real-world situations, as well as responsive quizzes to test knowledge and give people immediate feedback. Our goal was to launch Massage Mastery in this enhanced format in February of 2021. Eric went to work on the technology and I went to work rewriting Massage Mastery.

That’s when the pandemic hit.

I had already rewritten the chapters of Massage Mastery related to preventing disease transmission in a massage practice. These pieces were ready to build in the new learning platform, except that there was no new learning platform; it wasn’t planned for development until July 2020.

Eric and I knew that the material about preventing disease transmission would support massage professionals as they returned to work after quarantine was lifted. At the time, we had no idea what returning to work would look like, but we knew that returning to work would require more sanitation and hygiene then ever practiced before in the massage profession.

So, we went for it. While I wrote a chapter on COVID-19 for the last section of the digital text, Eric hired two web developers, a designer, and an assistant. We put them to work on customizing our learning platform (and used up most of our savings account – yikes!). We worked 10-14 hour days for five weeks and launched Preventing Disease Transmission in a Massage Practice on April 28, 2020.?

We are giving our new digital textbook away for free to anyone who wants to register for access. It is the best way we know to support a profession we have both loved and served our entire adult lives.

And people love it! We did a soft launch through Facebook on a Sunday afternoon and then sat watching our computer screen in amazement as registrations poured in. The digital book was being accessed by massage professionals around the world and by massage schools who were looking to address their pressing needs for online content.

We are happy to do our small part to help our profession get back on its feet as safely as possible and we welcome your feedback as we begin, with Preventing Disease Transmission, to bring our digital textbook dreams to life.??

Anne Williams