Nursing Education
If you needed budget-friendly ideas for hosting a dinner party, you’d seek out tips from a veteran lifestyle guru like Martha Stewart.
Likewise, if you needed ideas for increasing the efficiency and efficacy of your nursing program, you’d go straight to a veteran nurse educator like Dr. Marsha Cannon.
An Associate Professor of Nursing at the University of West Alabama, Dr. Cannon has been educating new nurses for more than 30 years. Today, she uses GoReact video assessment software to prepare more competent nurses faster. Here are the top three ways GoReact helps her do more with less:
The UWA Division of Nursing adopted GoReact in 2018 and now uses it to validate all skills except vital signs. Because Dr. Cannon’s primary role as a nurse educator is teaching fundamentals, she does a lot of skills validations.
The difference with GoReact is that she has the flexibility to validate skills anytime from anywhere.
“Traditionally,” Dr. Cannon said, “we would go to the skills lab for hours at a time and watch students over and over and over. Now, I can actually sit at my computer between class or at lunch—or even at home if I want to—and I can grade the video. So I think it helps with time management, with flexibility, and just being more efficient.”
When Dr. Cannon begins typing or recording audio/video feedback in GoReact, the video she’s evaluating automatically pauses and her comments are time-stamped and synced to that precise moment in the recording.
Then, when students review her feedback, they’re able to connect her comments to their performance and see for themselves what they did right or wrong. This makes Dr. Cannon’s feedback more constructive and boosts self-reflection for every student. It also makes any type of feedback—written, audio, or video responses—more efficient to give and more effective in helping students understand where they need to improve.
Using GoReact for feedback and grading also streamlines nursing skills checks because it enables nursing faculty to create and customize rubrics for every skill. As they watch each student’s video, instructors can simply click to rate the performance of required skills and share the results with students when their evaluation is complete (or whenever they want). They can also reuse or share rubrics with other instructors for future courses or assignments.
Outlining UWA’s process for using GoReact to validate medication administration skills, Dr. Cannon said students are required to start their skills demonstration videos by panning around the room to show that no aids or prompts are being used.
Then, as they prepare medications, students are asked to zoom in with their cameras so instructors can clearly see the dosage.
Once students upload their videos to GoReact for observation, Dr. Cannon can fast-forward, rewind, pause, or watch specific actions at faster or slower playback speeds. She said this makes assessment more objective and grading more consistent. It also provides a way for students to see exactly what the instructor saw.
“I had a student almost 20 years ago,” Dr. Cannon said, “who still today tells me … he did not break sterility, but he did. Now, if we’d had that video, then I could say, OK, look right here, you broke sterility.”
Dr. Cannon loves using GoReact to save time and effort while better preparing students, but she admits it wasn’t love at first sight.
“It was very difficult for me because I’m used to being in the lab … but I’ll be honest, I would not want to go back to a traditional skills validation. I love GoReact.”
