Nursing Education, Waiting for Research

Well, as far as education is concerned, the face to face approach to medical and other education does not have research completely supportive it, as far as the advantages of whiteboards, lecture, plain PowerPoints, essay, multiple choice testing, etc, but we still use it, lol. This system is basically just grandfathered in and accepted because it is what has been done. I have been teaching in nursing education for about 25 years and an RN for 31 years. Health care has certainly changed and changes very frequently, why not education? On a greater scale, society has changed and why should not education in general?

We recently moved towards mannequin simulators, which has some data but waiting for all of it to surface and prove its benefit, is causing a huge delay in implementing a system that is far superior to the above traditional approach. Why?- not because the data was there completely to support but because it works. Talk to students, look in their eyes when simulations are used, either with mannequin or Second Life sims. Look at students when in the hospital situation, they have an unpredicted situation occur, they draw on what was practiced in sims. More commonly, the students never experience a high acuity, low frequency situation, such as an acute myocardial infarction in hospital training, but the sims help prepare them for the day that they are working as a graduate and suddenly encounter an MI.

Certainly multiple learning styles need to be used in teaching now, and should have been always in the past, including text, graphics, video, auditory, simulation, and others. We have using sims in nursing for all the time I have been teaching, it is called lab. Nothing is different, except that the sims have more technology, but so does the world.

The education I am talking about in Second Life is a small investment, that does not require million dollar contracts or huge disruptions in other existing systems, but can be successfully implemented with 20k usd or so, including some training of faculty and students, scripted objects, land and other furnishings (vesim.org). This is exclusive of classroom, hardware or web requirements needed for teaching students using Second Life on the RL campus.

A Second Life approach still needs to used with a content delivery system, such as Blackboard, Moodle, Angel, etc. PowerPoints or other presentations need to have highly interactive components, not just text and few pics. Simple games like crosswords, Jeopardy, hangman, etc. can be used to increase some interactivity. Face to face in RL is desirable, through mannequin sims in RL labs and certainly hospital and other settings in the health care system. Discussion boards, wikis, blogs, and other ways of communicating are essential. While some of these can be implemented in Second Life, their use there is not always the best choice, as other systems of delivery, like just the web, are superior.

The problem with research on online teaching and even simulation, is that the teaching can be quite variable between instructors, and so you can be looking at an apple and orange comparison.

I try to teach using the best methods available to me at any given moment. I do not have to do any research fojavascript:void(0)
Publish Postr my continued employment and therefore have a larger contact with all my students. I teach all of my classes, no TAs, although that would be nice.