Educator Highlight

Every day we hear about new and innovative ways our customers are integrating response technology into their classrooms. These stories were so good we just couldn’t keep them to ourselves. Thats why we developed our "Educator Highlights".

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Dr. David Perlman

Dr. David Perlman is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing and an Associate at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). David also serves as President and Founder of E4 - Eclipse Ethics Education Enterprises, LLC, an ethics education service provider for health-related organizations. In each of these roles, Dr. Perlman has found the use of response technology to be beneficial in creating an engaging and active learning environment.

Introducing TurningPoint in Fall 2008 to assess student learning created significant improvements in Dr. Perlman's courses at Penn. David described TurningPoint's capabilities as a great way to make students feel more "at ease" as it allows them to receive immediate feedback regarding their own learning gaps without making them feel anxious or nervous about responding to questions. End of semester written evaluations revealed that students found the new class format engaging, informative, interactive, and fun.

Being an educator as well as a self-professed "technology buff," Dr. Perlman described his interest in Turning Technologies’ response solutions as being only natural. After introducing his first use of the TurningPoint system through a grant application, David integrated the technology into his course by using pre-recorded student ethical simulations on health care ethics topics. At the beginning of each class session, David presents ethics questions for his students to consider, then conducts polling to encourage discussion. To create additional excitement, Dr. Perlman intermixes friendly competitions into his course, such as rewarding students for the fastest correct response or using a Jeopardy-style competition with a final wager of points. The session then focuses on the ethics simulations on video, with the TurningPoint system assisting in the analysis of the simulations.

Using ResponseCard keypads, students work through the ethical features of each case presented. To start, Dr. Perlman shows several student-enacted and pre-recorded simulation videos of a case, then uses a clinical pragmatic ethics framework to work through the cases with students. Students begin by discussing their justifications for the moral diagnosis of the case. TurningPoint is then used to determine what students consider to be the top ethical issues in the case. Once identified, David leads a discussion on each ethical feature based on its rankings. Following this, Dr. Perlman has found it effective to present a variety of polling questions designed to elicit options to resolve the case. Again, using their ResponseCards, students rank the options in terms of the ethical justifications and discussion ensues. At the end of the class period, Dr. Perlman also uses TurningPoint to evaluate the effectiveness of the technology. "The use of the TurningPoint system along with the simulation case videos has been great. I am very satisfied with the technology and the learning environment I have been able to create with it," commented David.

For the 2009-2010 academic year, Dr. Perlman will be licensing Turning Technologies’ ResponseWare technology that allows students to use mobile devices and laptops to respond to polling questions. “This innovation will allow greater and more detailed exploration of ethical options and justifications in brief essay responses to polling questions,” David explained. Combined with a new wiki format to capture student research for their roles on the simulation videos and slide-based video podcasts of educational content for students in and beyond the course when they reach their clinical site training, Dr. Perlman hopes to create what he calls “Bioethics 2.0™ or “bioethics for the YouTube™ generation.”

Outside of his work at Penn, Dr. Perlman also uses the TurningPoint system to add interactivity to presentations and training sessions. Having worked in academia, government and industry, David noticed that training in these environments typically suffered from what he described as "turning an ethics or compliance policy document straight into a PowerPoint presentation and relying on the very un-engaging “click-click-click-take quiz-done” phenomenon. This approach was not acceptable for Dr. Perlman. It isn’t an effective way to engage learners. With the determination to improve learning environments, David founded E4, which stands for Eclipse Ethics Education Enterprises. With E4, Dr. Perlman hopes to change and challenge the typical paradigm in ethics education. As part of his approach, David integrates TurningPoint and its easy-to-use, virtually indestructible ResponseCard clickers to fully engage his on-site audiences with the material being presented. "People love the pre- and post-training polling option made possible with TurningPoint," mentioned Dr. Perlman. "It really gets people thinking about the topics and issues at hand, especially by comparing their own knowledge before and after a presentation." To further enhance learning environments for ethics education, Dr. Perlman is in the early developmental stages of using a type of branching technology in ethics scenarios. The results are rich, engaging ethics scenarios, similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure® books, whereby learners determine the path, trajectory, and outcome of a scenario. "This type of active and imaginative learning is an ideal fit with ethics education. Based on the choice or response, the scenario will evolve, resulting in a unique learning experience that is dynamic and facilitates critical thinking skills," described David. As a trial for this learning format, called Crucial Choices™ , E4 will be licensing several of the cases for inclusion in the wikis to be developed for Dr. Perlman’s nursing class.

Dr. Perlman's desire to enhance the learning experience in the field of medical ethics using response technology has created not only a more interactive classroom environment for his students at Penn, but also a company dedicated to improving ethics training for a variety of institutions and organizations. To learn more about Dr. Perlman’s nursing projects, review his faculty page at Penn Nursing at http://www.nursing.upenn.edu/faculty/profile.asp?pid=1902. To learn more about E4 - Eclipse Ethics Education Enterprises, LLC visit Dr. Perlman's website www.e-four.org or his more interactive wiki site at http://sites.google.com/site/e4wiki/Home