Adopting student response system in online ethics learning: practice and evaluation

The Student Response System (SRS) adds interactive elements in classrooms. Students can use their handheld devices to share their views actively during in-class polling. For ethics learning, it can facilitate free exchanges of ideas in a judgement-free environment and effectively arouse participants’ interest and inquiry of ethics. In a community college in Hong Kong, two ethics seminars were shifted from face-to-face to face-to-screen mode due to COVID-19 pandemic. They were blended with a popular SRS, Poll Everywhere, to facilitate opinion sharing. Other than verbal discussion, students participated by casting their choices about some ethical dilemmas in real-time through Poll Everywhere. Post-activity survey reflected that the approach of adopting SRS in online ethics learning facilitated participants to express their views, increased participants’ engagement and provided participants psychological safety to share opinions. The learning mode contains the nature of both interactivity and sincere sharing, and hence is specifically fit for ethics education.