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ETHICS EDUCATION AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES: COOPERATION OR CONFLICT?
June 23, 2022 @ 8:00 am - June 25, 2022 @ 5:00 pm
On June 24, Chair Fellow Fr. Joseph Tham, LC, will participate in the parallel session Ethics and Education with his contribution “Team project as a form of evaluation in a bioethics course.”
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: In recent years, higher education has become more student-centered as the Bologna process is assigning more time for students to study and research. During the pandemic, there has been a further need of online teaching which can be challenging in terms of didactic and evaluation. This presentation will look at team project assignments as a form of evaluations for students in a bioethics course in reproductive ethics.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: Team project was the final evaluation of Faculty of Bioethics core curriculum course entitled “Bioethics, Technology and Procreation” offered to two student groups in 2020. The 40 students were presented with a detailed methodology of team projects with PowerPoint presentations, YouTube videos, 4-page instruction and rubrics of evaluation. The students were encouraged to form groups of 3 to 5 among themselves. They need to come up with a team project that will reflect the course content discussed in class, select a target audience of the project with creativity and pastoral sensibility, and describe adequate measurements of impact of their project to their target. The deliverable can be in the form of didactic (course, seminars, sessions, retreats, etc.), mediatic (blogs, web page, forums, journals, etc.) or artistic (videos, songs, poetry, graphics, etc.) It comprised 50% of the final grade. They were evaluated by their teamwork (5%), the deliverable or report (40%), and the final presentation (5%) to other students. A questionnaire for feedback to evaluate this new method was requested at the end of the presentation and grading.
RESULTS: 38 students formed 10 teams and presented 10 projects. Each team had at least 2 encounters with the professor and 6-10 encounters among team members. Of the 10 projects, 6 were didactic in nature, 3 mediatic, 1 didactic-mediatic and 0 artistic. The grades of this final assignment range from 7 to 10, with an average of 8.64 out of 10. The feedback from the surveys demonstrated high satisfaction, as students discovered new values in teamwork and pastoral applications. Some students complained of too much time needed to complete the project.
CONCLUSIONS: Using team project as a form of teaching in bioethics is an educational innovation. There is a fear that students did not learn the course content from this methodology. This pilot study indicates that students can acquire sufficient knowledge when they worked to apply them in concrete situations. There is high satisfaction in pastoral application and teamwork that are not measured in standard evaluation methods. However, this innovation can be more time consuming both for the professor and the students, which in turn requires greater competency in time management and communication.