A new X-Labs course during the Fall 2025 semester, Hacking Well-Being at JMU, challenged students to address health and wellness needs on campus.
The class grew out of discussions led by Dr. Kristina Blyer (’12M, ’16Ph.D.), associate vice president for health and well-being; Dr. Stephanie Baller, professor of health sciences; and Dr. Jonathan Stewart (’19Ph.D.), assistant vice president for finance, information technology and assessment.
“Improving well-being has been a specific focus on JMU’s campus for several years,” Baller said.
One of the first critical steps in this direction came in Fall 2022, when JMU joined the U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Network in response to the Okanagan Charter call to action. The charter examines health from all aspects, locally and globally. Blyer worked with other JMU leadership teams to develop new domains for health and well-being around campus.
In preparation for the course, Blyer, Baller and Stewart devoted time to discussing how the class could merge evidence-based thinking with the design-thinking process. These talks resulted in the course using a combination of teachings from the College of Health and Behavioral Studies and the division of Student Affairs.
“As a Health Sciences major, I was drawn to learn about how students’ well-being plays a critical role in shaping JMU’s campus,” said sophomore Claire Machi. “I wanted to engage in a course that differed from a traditional learning environment and collaborate with diverse cohorts and departments at JMU.”
Machi and her colleagues came to realize that not every problem has a straightforward solution. “No one person will have lived the same experiences as another,” she said. “There is no single solution that will improve everyone’s well-being.”
The name Hacking Well-Being comes from the idea of “data-driven, incremental change for better well-being,” Baller explained. Courses like the ones X-Labs offers “highlight the opportunity for students to bring their disciplinary lens to the well-being challenges we face on campus.”
Senior Computer Science major Diego Navia knew the course would be challenging. “It was completely out of my area of study,” he said. But once he started, he felt more confident. “I found out that a lot of things that were integrated into the course were very familiar to me, and a lot of the things that I’ve learned throughout my computer science career could be applied into this kind of class.”
Baller found that gaps in well-being happen for different reasons. Sometimes it’s a “lack of awareness of existing resources or evolving changes that need to be grappled with to be meaningfully understood,” she said. As part of the course, student researchers were tasked with investigating gaps that they felt were most relevant to JMU’s campus.
“One wonderful thing about Health Sciences is that students in the major have a wide range of career goals,” Baller said. “So, to some extent, the students get to see how viewing health challenges from different career paths can yield differing perspectives.”
Machi initially thought the class would be centered on improving preexisting frameworks focused on well-being. Instead, she had to “reimagine the future of JMU regarding health and well-being.”
Students used a combination of feedback, experiences and research from their respective areas to develop solutions. One of their revelations was that JMU students — and college students in general — tend to lack engagement, attention and discipline when it comes to their well-being, and are afraid to step outside of their comfort zones.
At the end of the course, students gave a presentation that was shared with JMU’s Health and Well-Being leadership team.
