Nursing Education
Find out the key ingredients for making instruction and assessment successful without being in person
Hear from two nursing and communication experts creative solutions and important requirements for teaching and assessing communication competency in any learning environment.
Elaine Wittenberg:
I want to remind everybody, not everybody comes from a high resource institution, as LoraLynn mentioned. And so when you have limited resources, you have to be creative and it doesn’t mean that you can’t still provide communication instruction and assessment. So yes, you can simply have a student record what they would say and then provide feedback on that, if that’s one way to do it. You don’t necessarily have to have a live instructor there. And I’m sure LoraLynn will be able to provide more specifics.
LoraLynn Allen:
Yes. I love this question. This is a wonderful question, because it really does… You guys have already seen, I really like to address how we overcome barriers with this and how we utilize really good tools. One of the things that we did try as well was using that virtual learning environment. We had a piece that we used that we were able to trial out with our students, that very first semester of our pandemic restrictions. And the students were given these exercises and we had a variety, between providing written feedback that we went back and graded afterwards and then video feedback, exactly like Elaine said, where it is, “Show me what you would do.” But we didn’t have the resources to be able to synchronize that learning at the same time. And so we found that it was just as effective that way. Our instructors going forward preferred the synchronous interaction, so that’s something we’ve tried to incorporate there. But it’s absolutely possible. You just need to be very aware of what you are looking for, what you are going for with that learning activity, exactly like Elaine mentioned, and making sure that it actually does meet the objectives that you’re going for with that exercise.
