Toby Schonfeld, Ph.D., doesn’t believe everything she sees, hears, or reads.
And she encourages her students to process “day-to-day” messages with a similar open mind, critical eye and analytical ear.
The UNMC ethicist recently launched a Web-based critical thinking course geared to students in UNMC’s School of Allied Health Professions.
“The goal is not to just be better students, but better readers and thinkers in everyday life by analyzing what they see, hear and read,” said Dr. Schonfeld, assistant professor, section of humanities and law, UNMC Department of Preventive and Societal Medicine.
To meet that goal, Dr. Schonfeld unveiled the online critical thinking course this summer, in conjunction with the online health care ethics course she launched in the fall of 2002.
“All accreditation, licensure and good clinical practice require ethics education,” Dr. Schonfeld said. “The standardized Web course met the goals set by allied health.”
Based on her classroom teaching, Dr. Schonfeld knows critical thinking skills are not always part of a student’s educational experience. She’s known students who could recite various perspectives on a topic, but not original thoughts on it. The critical thinking course hopes to open minds, she said.
“We wanted them to start to question things and look at different issues with a more careful eye to make them better students,” she said.
The 16-week critical thinking course was developed, in part, with a grant from the UNMC College of Medicine Alumni Association. The 16-week health care ethics course was recently revised thanks to a grant from the Educational Support Office.
The health care ethics course is designed to teach students a set of tools, Dr. Schonfeld said. “We’re not giving them the answers to critical issues,” she said. “We want to teach them how to think through the issues.”
Participants in the health care ethics course learn how to: identify key issues; understand the roles and responsibilities of a professional; examine their own values and how they impact the care they can give patients; assess a patient’s values, goals and priorities; and not assume the patient’s values are the same as the professional’s.
“We want students to learn how to retain their integrity and yet respect the values of patients whose values may be different from their own,” Dr. Schonfeld said. “It’s about being culturally sensitive to other individuals.”
Students in the critical thinking course are tackling such concepts as deductive and inductive arguments; functions of language; and fallacies.
Online courses are convenient because the “classroom” is open 24 hours a day, but are as demanding as traditional classrooms for the student and instructor, Dr. Schonfeld said.
“The biggest challenge is to get students to view this course with the same amount of diligence that they view other courses,” Dr. Schonfeld said. “Their parity for working on the Web is to shop at Amazon or go to CNN or download iTunes, so when they go to a course like this they don’t always take notes like they would in a traditional class.”
The courses must be written and developed differently than traditional classroom lectures, Dr. Schonfeld said. Text is kept shorter to allow for less scrolling on the computer screen and more activities are used to engage students in the online dialogue. In one lesson, she even recorded her voice to narrate over a Powerpoint lecture.
Online education offers some real opportunities for students, but is incredibly labor intensive upfront and throughout the running of the course, Dr. Schonfeld said. “It’s false to think Web courses save instructors time or are any more efficient than traditional courses.”