Professional Ethics Course

This is the first draft of a course outline for Professional Ethics for physiotherapy students at the University of the Western Cape. I will continue working on it over the next few weeks, so feel free to comment in the Discussion page.

Context of the course

What this course is about.

Why is it being done in this way.

How it's being run.

The difference between what happens on Physiopedia, and what happens on students' blogs.

I'm also involved in a project that looks at the use of "social justice" as a concept in education. I will be framing some of the module around this idea.

Main concepts

1. Ethical principles and major content that the course will cover
2. Each of these will be explored in one week
3. The work of each week should build on the work that was covered in the previous week

Objectives and Learning outcomes

To equip teachers and students with the language of critique and the rhetoric of empowerment to become transformative agents who recognize, challenge, and transform injustice and inequitable social structures - Zembylas, M. (2012). Critical pedagogy and emotion: working through “troubled knowledge” in posttraumatic contexts. Critical Studies in Education

At the end of this course, students should be able to:

1. Identify and describe relevant theoretical concepts related to professional ethics in physiotherapy
2. Describe clinical encounters that present ethical dilemmas
3. Engage with their peers, other healthcare professionals in a public discourse on ethical challenges
4. Use a technology platform as a part of their learning environment
5. Learn digital literacy skills e.g. blogging, image editing, media embedding, etc.
6. blah, blah...

Timeframe

This course will run from July - August (specific dates still to be confirmed), in alignment with the third term in the South African Higher Education university calendar. While anyone is welcome to participate in the 

Our students would usually be in class for about 2 hours / week (for this module), and there would be an expectation that they would also do about 1 hour of homework / week. Therefore the activities in their entirety should not require more than 3 hours / week from each student. We would also have an expectation that they submit an assignment by the end of the term. In this case, their blogs will be their assignments.

Many institutions have, for administrative reasons, maintained the traditional schedule. Online classes still start in September, synchronous sessions are held once a week at a set time, and students are expected to maintain a traditional work schedule. But there is no academic or technological reason to stick to such a schedule.

Assessment

Each week students will be responsible for engaging with a stimulus (e.g. watch a video, read a paper), creating a product based on that stimulus (i.e. writing a blog post), interacting with each other (commenting on the work of other students). Will need to develop a rubric to assess students engagement / interaction / creativity / etc.

Communication

Need to teach students how to follow each others' RSS feeds, and remind them to check regularly.

Need to figure out how to send out mass messages to all students. Either we need a mailing list (nothing wrong with email) or they need to follow a hashtag on Twitter. I'm reluctant to use Twitter if not everyone has an account / is comfortable with using the service / uses it regularly. Want the emphasis to be on the work, not the tech. If it's a mailing list, messages are delivered to wherever they are, everyone has email, and even if students are on Twitter, not everyone has notifications turned on, they don't check it as regularly, etc. Thoughts?

Course activities

General structure of a week

1. Learning objectives for the week.
2. Stimulus that students will be directed to. Will be something that enables them to learn something about general ethical principles. These will probably be the same things that our curriculum covers, since our students will be assessed at the end of this module. I like the idea of using visual prompts as a stimulus.
3. Activity that they need to engage in e.g. writing something (reflection / poem), create a concept map that can be embedded into their blogs, etc.
4. Interact with others
5. Assessment and general feedback (not yet sure how this will work, since I can't review 60 blogs / week)
6. Interested in using Google Forms for students to fill out a short survey each week. Not sure what data will be gathered though. Also, this would only be for UWC students and not for anyone else interested in participating.
7. Showcase of exceptional student work for the week (?)

Week 1 :: Who cares what you think? (date)

1. Introduction to Professional Ethics
2. Difference between "morality" and "ethics". Need a place for course facilitators to post the expected outline (see below).
3. Morality: role of society, community, nationality, culture, language, religion, gender, sex, etc.
4. Ethics: Professional guidelines, Declaration of Human Rights, Bill of Rights
5. Internal vs. External observation and reflection i.e. look at yourself, rather than others.
   
6. http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html (can we embed TED / YouTube videos here?)

1. 
   

Week 3 :: Torture and Zero Dark Thirty

1. The idea here is to present a stimulus that the students can connect to (in this case, readings on the movie Zero Dark Thirty), and use that to connect to more complex ideas around individual rights vs the rights of society, medically sanctioned torture during Apartheid, etc.
2. Readings:

• http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61402-0/fulltext
• http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/02/zero-dark-thirty-torture-oscars
• http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/torture-in-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty.html
• http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61402-0/fulltext

Week 4 :: 

In South Africa we have an enormous problem with gendered violence, with our statistics on rape being higher than anywhere else in the world. However, the social problem of violence (whether physical, emotional or psychological) against women is global. I'm thinking of using the three events below to guide students into a discussion of gendered violence. The important point would be to move beyond the usual outrage and condemnation that sees these events as trending topics on Twitter, only to be eclipsed by the next Justin Bieber concert, or something else as inane. How can we use social justice and critical pedagogy as a way to move towards action in ways that aim to transform the world and society?

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steubenville_High_School_rape_case
  
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Anene_Booysen
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Delhi_gang_rape_case

Week 6 :: Child health and education

1. http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-10-18-sas-child-gauge-2012-suffer-the-little-children
2. http://www.section27.org.za/2013/02/20/the-shocking-state-of-infrastructure-in-limpopo-schools/ (schools / education, and relationship to health)

Student work

This is where we will index all students' blogs, and where they can find each other.

I'm interested in using a news aggregator on iPad / Android (something like Flipboard, Zite or Feedly) to create  personalised magazines of students' work. By using hashtags and keywords on their blog posts (as well as posting to Twitter), we can set up readers to aggregate the content from across the web. This then, becomes the course "textbook", changing all the time in response to the questions raised. I'm wondering if we could use categories / tags to differentiate the work into "Chapters". Any thoughts or suggestions?

Can also use Google Drive for collaborative work, if we want all of the students to do one thing together. The administrative requirements of this for one activity may be prohibitive though.

For the final submission, I was thinking of the following (an idea I got from this great post):

1. Each learner prepares and curates their best posts/creations from the course, and creates an ebook for assessment
2. All students in the course create a time capsule curation made up of the posts that they think best represents the course content, and creates an ebook that embodies the work they've done. "We were here, we learned this, and this collection represents that. Make use of this as you will, but this is what it meant to us. We hope it inspires you to push further than we did." This work could be shared with others, presented to students the next year, etc.
3. The Anthologize Wordpress plugin would make this process (I hope) quite simple.

Advice for students

Self-pacing in online learning, therefore, isn’t simply the learner picking up the work from time to time whenever he or she feels like it. It is rather the employment of various mechanisms that will enable work to be scheduled. Pacing continues to be important, even in instances of self-pacing. Being free to set one’s own schedule does not mean setting no schedule at all. Nor does it mean that the release of learning activities and content is not scheduled at all. It is, rather, a meshing of schedules.