The Australian designers and providers of online courses in heath and well-being are claiming success in a randomized controlled trial of a curriculum-based alcohol and cannabis prevention program.

CRUfAD Schools is a joint enterprise of the Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety and Depression at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, and the School of Psychiatry at the University of New South Wales.

The report of a cluster randomized controlled trial by researchers at the University's National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, published in Preventive Medicine, last autumn, concluded that students between the ages of 12 and 15 who took part were using the drugs less six months later than were those in the control group.

And, using translational research terminology that has become increasingly fashionable in the two years since the experiment in ten Australian schools was completed, it maintained that the course as well as being acceptable, was scalable – and that fidelity was assured.

Fidelity and scalability in this case are largely attributed to the consistency and limitless repetition made possible by the internet delivery of the six 15-20 minute computer-based components of the program, which require students to navigate their way through a cartoon-based teenage drama.

They were delivered alongside various prepared classroom activities for teachers and pupils available from the same website.

The evaluation by Nickie Newton and her New South Wales colleagues reasoned: "The computer and internet delivery guarantees that the complete content is consistently delivered to each student, overcoming the majority of the obstacles to effective program implementation.

"The classroom activities are included to allow students to interact with the content in relation to their own lives. They are provided in the manual to ensure that all the activities comply with the principles of evidence-based drug prevention, but also decrease the teacher's workload."

Five schools in the Australian trial – 397 students – were randomly allocated to the intervention condition, and five more – 367 students to the control condition

A dozen teachers and 98 students from each school were randomly chosen to evaluate the program. Teachers and students alike provided positive feedback. They found the course to be an acceptable means of school drug education.

The researchers acknowledge in the their report the potential weakness of relying so heavily on self-reporting – not only for a verdict on the course, but also for the students' own assessment of their alcohol and cannabis consumption.

But they defend the result: "While the demand characteristics would have been operative at the end of the course, it is hard to think that the demands of an anonymous web-based survey would have distorted the results after six months.

"Studies have found that self reports of transgressive behaviors such as substance use correlate with alternative assessment methods such as behavioral observations. In addition, online questionnaires have been found to be at least comparable, if not superior to the traditional pen and paper questionnaires in terms of reliability and validity."

Newton and her colleague also express concern that only independent schools were included in the trial , but here, too find little to undermine the results. "Future studies would benefit from recruiting a larger number of schools to provide the power to examine other important individual level (e.g. gender), and school level (e.g. average teaching experience) predictors in the Hierarchical Linear Models," they add.

The CRUfAD Schools programs have been funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing, the Australian Research Council, the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

• For the study findings used to advertise the courses, see, Newton N C, Andrews G, Teeson M and Vogl L E, "Delivering prevention for alcohol and cannabis using the internet: A cluster randomised controlled trial," Preventive Medicine 48, 6, pp. 579-584.