Hey, Alexa, who won first place in the 2018 Hyperdrive contest at the DevLearn Conference in Las Vegas?
“Lincoln Memorial University clinical skills veterinarian Jamie Perkins.”
The university’s College of Veterinary Medicine reported that Dr. Perkins, DMV, wowed the judges at the e-learning conference in late October when she gave a presentation on the use of Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker to teach communication and clinical reasoning to veterinary students.
Dr. Perkins, an assistant professor, is assigned to Lincoln Memorial’s Center for Innovation in Veterinary Education and Technology (CIVET).
“It was the intent of CIVET to harness technologies to innovate ways to improve student learning, and this project is a great example,” said the college’s dean, Jason Johnson, DVM, MS, DACT.
Myra Roldan, a program manager and instructional designer for Amazon, said DevLearn’s Hyperdrive contest “is an event where I go to see what innovations my peers have developed and implemented.”
“Enter Jamie Perkins, someone whose name I did not know, and I was blown away,” Roldan said. “Not only was she confident in her presentation, her innovation — an Alexa skill used to train veterinary students — was genius. … Jamie is definitely ahead of the game.”
Dr. Perkins’s Alexa work includes developing a skill that will help students prepare for the North American Veterinary Licensing Examination and another that will help students review anatomy and canine theriogenology.
“To my knowledge, we are the first veterinary school in the country to use Alexa technology to teach students,” she said.