Higher Education
See how GoReact improves healthcare students’ communication and critical thinking skills, enabling better patient interactions
This presentation will review the GoReact platform as a transformative tool capable of diverse uses within a healthcare curriculum. The primary focus will be how instructors can strategically utilize the GoReact platform within their courses to improve students’ communication and critical thinking skills, thus enhancing their ability to interact and effectively communicate with patients.
Presenter:
Jeremy Barthels is a department chair and associate professor at Northwestern Health Sciences University’s College of Chiropractic (NWHSU) program. With over 15 years of experience in higher education, Jeremy has played a pivotal role in shaping course content and curriculum development. His current primary objective is to enhance students’ critical thinking, communication, and empathy skills by utilizing innovative platforms like GoReact. By fostering these essential abilities, Jeremy aims to empower students to engage effectively with patients and improve patient outcomes.
Transcript:
Kelly Fitzgerald:
I’m pleased to introduce Jeremy Barthels, who is a professor at Northwestern Health Sciences University’s College of Chiropractic Program. Jeremy, I’m going to turn it over to you, the time is yours, and thank you so much.
Jeremy Barthels:
All right. Well, thank you everyone. I’m going to [inaudible 00:00:15] my screen set up here to share, and then we’ll get going. If you could pop in actually the first poll question, that would be fantastic as well too, so we can get started with that, and looking at who actually teaches within a healthcare program, because that’s really where I’m coming from traditionally, is from a healthcare background. But this idea of improving, you could take out chiropractic, and you could just say improving student communication, critical thinking skills within coursework, that you may not even think about having that particular sort of skillset injected into your courses.
So let’s take a look at some of our objectives that we have here for this presentation just real quick. Discuss the role of effective communication, critical thinking skills within patient-centered care, the current challenges in incorporating communication, critical thinking skills into the courses that you have, maybe just in general, the curricula overall. Identify the versatality … versatility, I’m sorry, of the GoReact platform in courses and curricula. Then we’ll get into the benefits, and my personal experiences, and insights that I’ve had working with and incorporating GoReact within the coursework, and then highlighting some of those experiences as well too.
It seems like a 30-70 split in regards to who teaches in a healthcare curriculum. Again, this presentation is dedicated to the chiropractic courses that I teach, but again, this is something that can be used across all different course curricula here. So let’s get into a little biography of myself. I’m Dr. Jeremy Barthels, I’ve been in higher education for at least 15 years or so. I did graduate as a chiropractor back way in the early part of 2000s, practiced for at least 10 years full-time, and then did some part-time stuff. I had to navigate outside of practicing full-time due to some neuromuscular skeletal issues that I’ve had developed over the years due to childhood cancer treatment.
So I kind of switched out of practicing, and got into higher education, and worked for an institute called Rasmussen University for a while, and then was able to join on to Northwestern Chiropractic College here, which is where I wanted to be long-term. Obviously, being a chiropractor, I wanted to teach within a chiropractic program. One highlight here. I do have a Master’s in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, not as a bragging source, but it’s just something how when we talk about these communication critical thinking skills, it really comes back to that as well too. At Northwestern, I’m a basic science faculty member, and a department chair in a different department outside of that. If you have any questions about me, or about what I’m doing, or any further GoReact questions, that’s my communication email address there, so easily reach out to me whenever you can.
So this whole process of me wanting to really improve communication and critical thinking skills within the basic sciences courses that I teach, I get ahead of myself, I teach Physiology 1, I teach Physiology 2, Pathology 1, and Pathology 2, and this is earlier in the curriculum. It’s basically a 10 trimester program, and I’m teaching these students in term two, term three, and term four, which is really fantastic. I have a whole year basically with these students, and I get to know them. These assignments that I have are building off of each other as they go through the courses that I teach, through term two, through three and four here. So when they get to about term six, seven, they’re starting to go into the clinical sciences aspect of it, more at the end of term six here.
Reaching out, and just kind of casually, this anecdotal feedback that I was getting from clinical faculty members is that students have a really hard time communicating, and they have a really hard time especially describing what chiropractic care is to patients, and even other healthcare practitioners. When they go through their interviewing skills to go out on their internships, same thing. They have a hard time just articulating what they do, how they do it, and the benefits of the care that they provide, and even in some cases express an empathy, which is obviously something that we want to improve upon.
In a lot of healthcare curriculums, it’s like sciences, clinic, and there’s not much of a bridge between there sometimes, and I was like, “This is something that I need to take ownership of and improve within my students.” I just can’t say, “I’m just the physiology instructor. I’m just the pathology instructor.” These are communication and critical thinking skills. Different universities call them like soft skills, transferable skills, these are skillsets that students need no matter what program, or what sort of … if they’re in healthcare, or if they’re in some sort of other science background, or even maybe business or whatever it may be, critical thinking communication skills are needed across the board. So I felt like I’ve had a missed opportunity in my curriculum to build these skills, and so this is what started the whole process of why, and how, and where do I begin to really inject these communication and critical thinking skills, while still trying to teach students the content in physiology and pathology.
So I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this since 70% of you are not really teaching in the healthcare curriculum, but some of the ideas of communication needs that our students need, and any healthcare student needs is with patient-centered care, patient trust, empathy, these are all really, really, really vital sets of communication that you need to have when you’re interacting with patients. Cultural competency, patient engagement, shared decision process, it comes back to patient-centered care. When you’re talking about informed consent, trying to maybe reduce anxiety and fear in the patients. If you’re having a hard time communicating with them, or you seem nervous, or scared, that doesn’t alleviate their anxiety or fear, especially within chiropractic care when … Some patients come in and they’re really nervous about getting their neck adjusted, or their lower back adjusted, and we need to have clear communication to be able to alleviate those sort of anxieties and fears, and be able to answer their questions and stuff.
The idea of continuity of care and integrative healthcare is another big thing that we see in all scopes of healthcare. It’s just this integration, and being able to collaborate, and interact interprofessionally with other healthcare providers, and being able to share like, “Here’s what I do, and here’s why I did it.” That all takes this communication and critical thinking skills. Again, hearing this from our clinical faculty, I’m like, “I need to do something more.” I felt obligated because, again, coming up with my Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution, that’s all communication, that’s all critical thinking skills. So I started out, well, just real quick, I don’t think I need to elaborate too much on critical thinking skills.I say it’s everything and everywhere, and in anything. So no matter what you’re doing, critical thinking skills is the epicenter of what we’re doing, and that’s from reasoning to analyzing, and all of that sort of aspect in between our students need to critically think.
I start this on day one, talking about like, “Hey, we’re going to obviously learn physiology, but we’re also going to learn communication skillsets, and we’re also going to improve our critical thinking skills because this is something that you absolutely need in this profession. You have to take all this knowledge, these nuggets of knowledge, and bring it together, what the patient said, what the lab results said, what the imaging said, all of these knowledge areas, bring that data together and figure out what’s going on with the patient, and figure out then the treatment plan from there.” So critical thinking skills is something that I really try to enforce, and improve within my students. With this then I said, “Okay, where can I do this in my curriculum for physiology and pathology? What can I do?” I was thinking, “Well, here’s a good idea. Let’s get a video capturing software program that allows students to start explaining physiological processes, explaining pathological processes to maybe a simulated patient.”
So I got out and I started looking, this was about a year and a half ago, and there is a number of different applications out there. I think I started off with the Flip app, it’s something that students could use. It was cool at first, but there was tremendous limitations. It was free, which was an advantage, but I had very little integration within the LMS that we’re using. Right around that time, our university got a license to the GoReact platform, I was like, “Oh, this is fantastic. This integrates right into our LMS. We can create rubrics inside of the GoReact platform to grade students performances. It has a very simple interface for not only faculty, but for students.” That idea of simplicity really captured everything. I do have some videos to share if you’ve never seen GoReact, and just some of the uses that I use GoReact for here. I recorded some videos of students utilizing it here, we’ll share at the end. So I said, “Okay, let’s do this. Let’s put this in there. Let’s get this together.”
I kind of encountered a number of obstacles. Obviously, the emphasis of communication and critical thinking skills, the focus of that is not really in basic sciences, and so I had to step outside of that norm so to say, and even prioritize it in that idea of transferable or soft skills that students need to have. I was looking across the basic sciences curriculum, and the courses, and there was very limited, if not any learning opportunities for students to really improve their communication and critical thinking skills, so this really excited me and I was like, “This is something I really, really need to do then.” So I identified where in my courses I could add the GoReact platform assignments, and just in the bigger curriculum as well too, because as I said, I have them over the course of a year, which is kind of unique. I have them from two to term three, to term four, those trimesters.
Some of the other obstacles I had then, obviously with large classes, maybe I have a cohort of 80 to a 100 students, sometimes depending on when they start them, it might be only 30 students. So there was some, obviously assessment grading difficulties that would pop up, but again, the capabilities of the GoReact platform to have the rubrics built inside of it really seamlessly made grading very efficient, and universal from student to student. There wasn’t like, “I’ll just give the student a four, or give the student three.” This is really where they’re able then to get the grade, and then look at the rubric like, “Oh, this is where some of the areas that I did not succeed, and that I need to improve upon.”
Technology integration issues. Since this was an LMS integration, I had to work with the instructional design team, and the IT team to be able to do that. The learning curve for faculty and students is almost zero. It is such a user-friendly interface that it doesn’t take much effort to get in there and start using it. Once you create the rubrics and you incorporate the rubrics, it’s just smooth sailing from there.
This is probably the bigger thing that I have initially with student approval and resistance to change, is that students are like, “Why in physiology do I need to record me communicating?” Students don’t like these assignments at first, and then as I start to educate them on the importance of it, and demonstrate where this comes into play later in the curriculum, and as an intern, and then as a chiropractor in general, they start to understand and appreciate why we are doing this. It’s not just an assignment to do an assignment, it has a purpose, it has a need, and it has a skill set that we’re trying to improve upon. Once they understand that, it takes a few weeks maybe of communicating and educating them on this. Students are like, “Yeah, this is great. This is really cool.”
What am I doing? Well, let me back up first. Some of the stuff that I’m doing in my coursework is just the communication and presentation skills here. So communication presentations is what they’re doing. I have them doing some patient scenarios and stimulations, but I know some of my other faculty members that I’ve been working with, and trying to get them to incorporate GoReact into their coursework too, they do it for skill demonstrations. Students can, as a check-in to see if they’re doing a certain orthopedic test correct, or if they’re doing a certain examination correctly. They’re able to sort of have that skillset be demonstrated on that video.
Interviewing skills. We started using this for interviewing skills in that courses that have interviewing. Peer review. I know some of my faculty members are having students watch other students’ videos, maybe where they give an opinion or feedback sort of thing, and peer review them. So there’s a peer review aspect that can be. Reflective piece. This is something that we’re starting to add to this as well too. So when they go out on internships, observational internships or observing some sort of a clinic, they’ll come back, instead of writing a reflective practice paper, they’ll do it via GoReact and be able to have to explain it. Then ethical dilemmas and decision-making, we’re doing this. I know in the mental health course, we have Mental Health 1 and 2. In my department that I am department chair in, we were able to work in some assignments with the GoReact situation, where we put the soon-to-be doctor in a ethical situation with their patient, and then they have to walk through what they would do via the GoReact recording.
So some of this then too is in response, and I’m sure there’s a number of presentations talking about AI, and the use of AI in coursework and stuff like that. I’m trying to find a different way, students just can’t just go out to GPT and ask it a question, get a response, clean it up maybe just a little bit, and then copy and paste it into their assignment, and have that submitted. This adds an extra step, and I actually encourage them to use GPT. I’ll talk about this here in a little bit as they do their communication presentations here. So what of all these have in common? They all have this skillset of communication and critical thinking, these ethical dilemmas, the patient scenarios, all of these have this basis of critical thinking. The GoReact is just not this sort of video capturing software program that students can just submit assignments, you can really focus in on the communication, and the critical thinking aspects of it. You’ll see some of that demonstrated in my assignments, and the rubrics that I have, and you’ll see I’ll share the rubrics that I utilize for these.
This is the activities that I’ve come to create in my courses. So in Physiology 1, Physiology 2, and then term four students take both Pathology 1 and Pathology 2. Initially, I’m just getting them to explain physiological processes. In each Physiology 1, and Physiology 2 course, they have eight quizzes, and for each quiz they have to do a GoReact video associated with it too. So whatever that quiz’s content is on, they have to record themselves to up to two minutes to explain one of those concepts that are on the quiz. So we’ll see what some of that looks like, and how wonderful students really take this seriously, and what they incorporate into their presentations. Let’s say we’re talking about cardiac physiology, and maybe they have to talk about cardiac muscle contraction, or maybe some of the variables that influence cardiac muscle function, and so they’ll take up to two minutes to explain that, and then they can use that as obviously the review for the quiz, and their classmates can watch each other’s videos as well too, to help them review as well.
So they continue to do that in Physiology 2, but it’s a little more difficult because there’s more advanced physiological processes that we’re talking about. In both Physiology 1 and 2, I have critical thinking assignments, and the critical thinking assignments in Physiology 2 are more patient scenarios, and ethical dilemmas that they have, maybe with some sort of physiological process that’s the centerpiece for that. There isn’t really necessarily a, well, there’s wrong answers, but there isn’t necessarily, for all of them, exactly one particular right answer. So this gets them thinking about ways to interact with these different physiological processes with what maybe a patient asked them to do. There might be an ethical dilemma to it, there might be a business dilemma to it or something of that sort, but it really makes them put on their so-called critical thinking hat, and really walk it through.
Again, this is something that I incorporated because I started seeing students’ answers look very GPT-ish as I call it, very sort of not written by them, just the way the wording was and stuff like that. But it was hard to prove that they weren’t using it, or that they were using it to invoke academic integrity policies, so I was like, “Well, what can I do to improve and make students really work through these critical thinking situations?” Maybe they use GPT to help them framework their answer, but they still then have to articulate it, they still have to go through and explain it in the video capturing that GoReact has. Same with Physiology 1. I encourage them maybe sometimes to use GPT to help them frame it, but I tell them, “You have to own it. You just can’t look at a sheet of paper and look down.” You’ll see in the rubric there’s variables that measure empathy in that sense, but they’re like, “Okay, type one hypersensitive,” they have to own it, and they have to talk through it like they’re talking to a patient or another student, or something like that.
So then in Path 1 and Path 2, we really ramp it up, and so they have to explain medical conditions to a patient. Now they have to, whatever topic we’re talking about, maybe it’s immunology, maybe it’s endocrinology in that week, they have to explain one of those medical conditions that we’re covering, and explain it as if they’re talking it to a patient. Now they’re not using the scientific terms, they’re starting to use terminology that a patient would understand, and really maybe correlating it to an analogy or some sort of metaphor, or some sort of aspect that a patient would understand. Students really struggle with this because they’re so used to just explaining things as they’re taught, but now taking a step back and say, “Okay, I have not only own the content, understand the content, but I have to own it so much that I can explain it to someone who doesn’t have a science background or healthcare background.” So they have that to work through.
Then at the end of Pathology 2, at the end of term four, their big assignment is accumulating all these skillsets, is explaining chiropractic care to a patient, and then in the last week, they have to explain chiropractic care to another healthcare practitioner. I give students opportunity to submit practice runs before they get graded, and so I give them a tremendous amount of feedback in that, but this is where students really, sort of at this point, excel. You can really tell at this time, students that have put the effort in through these last two and a half-terms, to students that just kind of coasted along. I’m still trying to figure out how to get everyone, 100% of the students to really put the effort in because some of them are okay, and some of them I just get wowed by their capability, at even just term four, to be able to explain chiropractic care to a patient, or to another healthcare practitioner.
So just some of the rubrics that I’m using here in Phys 1 and Phys 2 when they’re just explaining a physiological process, not worth mega points, it’s only five points for each one. They got the clarity of the explanation, the content accuracy, and the use of language. So they need to use the appropriate language, and the clarity of explanation for this sort of, like what does that. We cover endocrinology as well too, so how does a particular hormone influence the physiology of the body or something of that sort? They have to explain that accurate, and use the appropriate language. Oh, I don’t know why that … Oh, this is for Path 1 and Path 2 then.
So we still have these bullet points here. Now we’re up to 10 points though for these assignments. When they’re explaining it to a patient, this is the clarity, the accuracy, the use of language, the patient language, and then engagement and empathy, we’re adding that sort of variable to the rubric, to allow them to have that sort of no longer being able to read it from a, well, you can see when I’m recording, you can tell if you watch their eyes, you can just tell if they’re just reading it from a screen, and it’s just very monotone, they’re not really owning or being able to elaborate on the content very well. So this is where those points come into that, and being able to say, “Okay, that was great content, that was great information, but you need to own it. You need to not just read it from a document, because when you get into clinic you’re not going to be reading it right from a document.” So we start that. Then, with the chiro explanation to a patient and healthcare practitioner, this is 25 points, and the engagement.
Each one of these bullet points has individual areas that are highlighted. I think in the notes section, you should be able to access the rubric here. Now, one thing that we’re working on, we don’t have it completely done, is I’m working with the clinical faculty members when students are in their clinical internships, to build a rubric that can be utilized to assess their communication and critical thinking skills. This is just spanning the entire curriculum, starting early on, looking and focusing on communication and critical thinking skills, and then trying to assess it later in the curriculum to see if we are improving. It’s a slow process, but these are some of the bullet points, variables that we’re assessing and adding to the rubric, to allow for students to be assessed on as they interact with their patients, or they’re out on an internship and they’re interacting with patients in that internship clinic, or in an interview, whatever it may be, we have that particular rubric here.
So let’s pull up some of the other poll questions. Poll question two, let’s just get a quick view at the poll question two here, just to see if anyone’s using GoReact in their current courses. We’ll see how that’s situated with us, and then once we get this here, we’ll just give it a moment. Like I said, I have some video stuff to walk through. I recorded a video of students. Oh, cool. Very cool. Yes and no. So let’s do a real quick three and four, question three and four on communication, and then critical thinking skills. I’m just kind of curious on where everyone is with that. I’m going to stop sharing for a moment to get my other videos set up. Well, I guess for just question three, how are utilizing GoReact in our courses? That will be interesting to see. Just give it a moment here.
All right, I haven’t seen the, for question three, I haven’t seen the poll results yet, but that was just basically asking, “How are you using GoReact in your courses? Is there a specific theme that you’re having?” Okay, right here is question three. We’ll give everyone some time to answer that. From the previous poll question, it seemed like the majority of individuals, almost three-quarters of the individuals attending are using GoReact, which is fantastic. Let’s see these results here, skills based communication, multiple ways, good, not currently using it. Okay, so there’s a lot of different capabilities of how to incorporate GoReact into your coursework, and it’s just a matter of like, “Okay, what skillset do I want to improve within student learning, or what learning opportunities do I want to provide for students with this sort of platform?” Then kind of build it from there.
I won’t spend a lot of time looking at this video in regards to the overall user interface and the platform, what it looks like, but basically when you log in and students submit assignments, the assignments will be on the side here. You can see the students. Everything’s blurred out, any sort of identifier for the students. Then it just is really easy, you can filter this, and look at it in a couple different ways, whether it’s by scored or unscored. You can see none of these have been scored, and I’m just going to skip through here. When you click on a student then … The link here, it takes you right to the video, [inaudible 00:26:56] it, but here you can have where you enter in the comments, which is a very common thing that I do when the video is sometimes just two or few of them.
So then you have, obviously the rubric, and there’s a couple different formats for the rubric, whatever works best for you, which is really fantastic. It is not one that fits all, they have a couple different ways you can enter in the rubrics within the platform here. It makes grading very efficient even if you have a cohort or a class of 80 plus students. Sometimes I have a 100 students, and it does take some time in providing the feedback, but I can provide very specific feedback because if I have the rubric built out very well, they can see where they did well, and where they didn’t do well, and that kind of gives them some insight to what they were doing here as well. This is, I’m just going to skip ahead here for a moment. This here, you can see the rubric, the intensity of the rubric. I just want to skip ahead to what some students are doing for this communication process here.
So this is in Physiology 1. This is an example of what a student is doing. Not every student uses this technology background. This student particularly makes PowerPoint slides, and does a whole sort of array of unique animations within the PowerPoint slides, and here he is talking about the different variables that affect heart function. It’s really cool, and it’s really fantastic to see the level of organization, and the level of intensity that students take these videos with, and really make an effort to discuss it. So you can see this student is interesting because he’s a very techie person, he’s able to do it. This student here-
Speaker 3:
[Inaudible 00:28:57] talking about monocyte action potential.
Jeremy Barthels:
She’s just going through the action potential process here, and she pulled up a video, and is able to highlight and even cite the video, not the video, but the picture where she got it from. So then she walks through and talks about this video, and talks about that physiological process here. I allow students to do this sort of process with-
Speaker 3:
Opens, and then polarization, which we saw in muscle contraction or muscle action potentials, but we do have the refractory periods.
Jeremy Barthels:
So they go through it very well, and then I do allow students to team up, and so they can work with one other classmate. Here’s an example of two classmates working together.
Speaker 4:
Physiology [inaudible 00:29:48] made up of the renal corpuscle and the renal tubule. The renal corpuscle is made up of Bowman’s capsule and the glomerulus right here, and then the renal tubule is made up of the proximal convoluted tubule.
Jeremy Barthels:
So this is in Physiology 2, it’s still worth five points, but students, again, take it very seriously, and they make a really tremendous effort in explaining this physiological process. Now, one thing anecdotally I’ve seen as well too is, overall, grades have been better, averaged better, or I should say averaged better for students when I started this GoReact platform assignment. Really, I encourage them to take a topic that they are not understanding very well, and walk through and explain it because short-term, long-term, it’s really going to help them be able to succeed in that knowledge base of that. So these two students are going back and forth.
Speaker 5:
Some of our cardiac output is-
Jeremy Barthels:
Kind of just talking about two different areas of the concept, so they’re sharing that sort of thing. You can even add teamwork into this. This is probably one of those highlights that I overlooked, is if you have a group assignment and you have teamwork, and that sort of variable can be incorporated into the platform as well too. What I love about this is, again, you can timestamp your feedback. Your feedback going to the students can be associated at particular time, so when students look, they can go back to that timeframe and say, “Okay, this is what the instructor was talking about with that particular feedback that they gave.”
Now here, this is going into pathology, where students then are explaining some sort of pathological or pathophysiological process to a patient. The big thing here is using appropriate terminology. This is, again, where critical thinking skills are coming into it. This is something that is not necessarily common in pathology, or with the physiology aspect of actually trying to communicate and improve those critical thinking skills. This is something, the platform itself, the GoReact gives you this variable, and this ability to really open up your learning opportunities in your courses. Otherwise, it kind of gets stagnant and stale in some cases, where students are just doing the same thing over and over again, but this really opens up some of those different learning opportunities that you can provide to students. So this student is talking about the inflammatory process to a patient.
Speaker 6:
That is how I would explain it. Well, when you rolled your ankle, sprained your ankle, or twisted your ankle, anything that you want to describe it as, you created some damage.
Jeremy Barthels:
So this is where students really struggle at first when they get into pathology, is just the capability. They understand the process, and in a lot of student cases they explain it very well, but to another possible student or to another healthcare practitioner, not necessarily to a patient. So the use of language, and how they describe that process to the patient or the simulated patient is really important, that’s really what I reinforce in this particular assignment. So they’re really gaining that skillset, not only communication, but critical thinking skillset of, “How do I explain this to a patient that they would understand it?” When I provide feedback and comments to the student, I will always like, “As a patient, I wouldn’t understand this terminology. As a normal patient, this sounds confusing to me. How would you explain it differently? How could you explain it differently?” So giving them some insight from a patient perspective of what that may look like or sound like, and stuff like that. Here’s another one.
Speaker 7:
Just wanting to know how they figure out if rheumatoid arthritis is what they have, and just more about it in general. So then I would tell them that rheumatoid arthritis is pretty much a autoimmune disorder, which is when your immune system, the system that protects you from getting sick, is mistaking your joints.
Jeremy Barthels:
So students, like I said, they can retake. Some students say, because they can provide feedback comments as well too, that you see before watching their videos, and some will say, “Okay, this was my fourth version of this video that I recorded.” So they take it very seriously, and they want to do the best video that they can, or put forth the best video that they can. They’ll record it multiple times in some cases to be able to really get it to where they want it to sound, or what they’re talking about, to be able to articulate that quite clearly. Here’s another one.
Speaker 8:
[Inaudible 00:34:25] want to know a little bit about chiropractic care. Well, first, like many doctors, there are different fields of study and specialties, like oncologists for cancers, surgeons whose specialty-
Jeremy Barthels:
So this student used a particular analogy to explain chiropractic care to a patient regarding postal workers, and I thought it was pretty interesting, and something I’d never heard before.
Speaker 8:
These messages are sent through our nerves to tell different parts of our body to do specific things, like moving your arm to grab something. Now, here’s an example that is exaggerated, but might help paint the picture. This example uses the idea of sending and receiving mail through postal carriers. First, I want you to think that the mail or letter being sent-
Jeremy Barthels:
So this student had a whole explanation comparing chiropractic care to the function, how chiropractic care works and the function of the nervous system to postal carriers, and how things get mailed to the postal office and then back out. It was really, really interesting, but I was like, “Ah, I never would’ve thought of that.” So we worked together to refine it and improve it to his final presentation, which was really fantastically done for this particular student. Here’s another student talking.
Speaker 9:
… electrical wiring and messaging system, and when the spine is not in proper alignment, it can affect the messages that your brain is trying to send to the rest of your body.
Jeremy Barthels:
So again, with these, there’s really sometimes no right answer because they can explain it how they want to explain it, but there’s definitely wrong answers, and wrong phrases and terms, and concepts. So early on in the curriculum, I can start molding, I don’t want to say molding, but identifying certain phrases that we don’t want to see utilized to explain chiropractic care, and help them use more appropriate word choices and phrases, and bring in more research into their explanations as well too. I think there’s just … Here’s another one.
Speaker 10:
Excretory and GI systems, we know how to examine for those systems, and-
Jeremy Barthels:
So this is one of the first ones. You can’t see the feedback obviously, but you can see all the feedback that I provided the student. They’re just little inputs of like, “Okay, maybe think about it in this way, or maybe think about it explaining it this way, or this doesn’t sound very … it sounds a little confusing to me as a patient.” So giving that feedback is important for them to be able to make that improvements, and make that effort to continuously improve their video presentations that they’re doing. Again, this aspect of adding that feedback is really, really easy to do. Again, when you have the rubric, that adds more efficiency to it as well too. I’m not going to play all … I’ll play a little of this student’s [inaudible 00:37:16] too.
Speaker 11:
I’m helping the body to better neurologically function. So I do this by spinal manipulation, fascial and muscle work, exercise and rehabilitation.
Jeremy Barthels:
So that’s just kind of quick little glimpse into what I have been doing with the GoReact platform, but again, I want to highlight this slide here. As we saw on that poll question here, I go back here, a couple here, sorry, that poll question. It seems like a number of faculty are using the GoReact in various different learning opportunities, and if you’re not, I encourage you to go out. It feels like I’ve been hired by GoReact to promote their platform, and I can tell you I haven’t. I’m just very excited, and feel very fortunate that this platform is available for us to use with its very simple interface, and the ability to create those rubrics. No matter if you’re in healthcare or any other sort of curriculum, at a university or college, whatever it may be, there’s a lot of different learning opportunities that you can expand upon in your courses, and really … maybe it’s communication, maybe it’s critical thinking, maybe it’s something else that you can utilize the GoReact platform to really accentuate in your course.
Like I said, in our mental health course, we really made it interesting by putting students in these patient scenarios, well, patient scenarios that have these ethical dilemmas or decision-making process. Do you continue to work on this patient? Do you refer them out? How do you do both? Or what do you do in those situations? To really get them thinking about these real-life application or use situations that they’re not commonly getting maybe in mental health. They’re not thinking about that maybe in mental health, in a traditional mental health course. It’s just all about identifying symptoms and disorders, and that sort of thing. Now we’re adding a level of education, and learning opportunities that they normally may be not getting in that course, but really improving and enhancing their skillset, so when they do graduate and they do come across these scenarios or situations, they’ve seen it before and it’s not something necessarily new to them.
We’re very close to the ending here, I just want to see if there’s any questions or concerns, or any sort of particular feedback that you may have with this presentation, my use of GoReact. I thank everyone for attending. I really appreciate it, and I’m very excited to have you here.
Kelly Fitzgerald:
Thank You, Jeremy. It looks like there is a question in the Q & A here, it’s from Evie. The question is, “What the RN student models does the thinker regard to AI alignments referring the types of kairos?” It looks like their client wants to review AI video and texting tips to GoReact.
Jeremy Barthels:
Oh, AI texting, okay. Can you unmute yourself and ask the question? I just want to make sure I’m answering the question correctly, if you’re still there, or elaborate on that a little bit. Well, I’ll say for AI usage, with the explaining chiropractic care to a patient, and to another healthcare practitioner, I commonly say, “Why don’t you go into GPT or some other AI resource and help you frame your message to the patient or the other healthcare practitioner, and build off of that? But own it.” That’s the big thing is, I don’t think we’re ever going to get around. I mean, I was a faculty when Wikipedia came out and everyone was freaking out that it was going to destroy education, and it didn’t. As long as you embrace it, something as a resource, and teach students how to use it as a resource, and its limitations and capabilities, I think we’ll still be fine. AI is just that same sort of concept, it’s just a little, obviously way more enhanced, and so I have students using it.
I encourage them to use it, and to build off of it, again, they have to own it, they can’t just read what they’re saying. I can tell when the students are just doing that, when they’re just reading from the screen. It was obviously just a GPT sort of recording, not recording, but a message, and you’re watching their eyes just go right across the line and down, and there’s a variable. Sometimes I makes students redo it, I say, “Okay, this is great information. Modify it a little bit. Here’s how you can modify it, and then represent it as if you own it, and as if you are not reading right from a script.” That’s what we want to get with students. Anything that we can do to enhance their critical thinking skills, and especially in healthcare, AI is going to be brought into the healthcare profession even more so than what it is now, and so we have to work with it as a resource, and that takes critical thinking skills to be able to do that effectively.
Kelly Fitzgerald:
Thank you so much. I think we’re just out of time now so we won’t be able to answer any more questions, but we just want to say thank you so much, Jeremy, for such an insightful session. I personally loved all the real-time examples of how you’re using the tool, especially in that critical thinking space, so thank you so much.