Interview 1: Conducted on Friday 18 March with a colleague who teaches the Clinical Skills part of the second year nursing programme.
Who are their students? Nurses in their second year of the BN programme. There are 120 in the year.
The five dimensions of flexibility:
Entry requirements: Students must have passed all papers in the first year BN Nursing degree programme.
Time: Students can study the on-line material at any time and place to suit themselves. They do however, require good broadband internet connection. Material is left on the Moodle site all year, so the content can be revised by students (and updated by teaching staff).
Students come in to a Simulation Laboratory (Sim Lab) at a pre arranged time each week. Sim Labs are designed to teach and assess practical nursing skills and run for 2 hours.
Delivery and logistics: The class is divided into 4 groups. After 2 weeks’ of taught classroom theory content, one half of one group (A1 of 12 students) come into a clinical Sim Lab while the other half of the group (A2 of 12 students) are out on a clinical nursing placement. Other groups rotate through the Sim Lab over the rest of the year.
For the group doing the Sim Lab, the course content is provided on Moodle, each student is expected to have completed the directed on-line learning before coming to the Sim Lab (weekly from 10 to 12).
Content and instructional approaches and resources:
A blend of resources is used. Preparation for the clinical scenario includes reading Instructional resources placed on Moodle.
The on-line learning chapter contains:
1) A PowerPoint presentation (voiced over).
2) Three clinical placement role play scenarios.
3) A DVD showing how to complete the clinical skills (made by the lecturer and School of Nursing staff)
4) Directed reading from the textbook.
In the Sim Lab time, students are organised into groups of three and are assigned one of the four role plays. The role plays cover medical and surgical situations related to the clinical placement area, e.g., completing post-operative care for a person undergoing a femoral-popliteal bypass. They provide a safe and effective way of practicing nursing care in a supervised environment.
In each role play scenario there are three roles. 1. The patient, 2 the Registered Nurse, and 3 the peer assessor. Each role play takes 20 minutes to perform and students swap roles. There is a ‘debrief’ by the clinical lecturer at the end of each role play session. In the debrief session, each person’s performance is evaluated against the pre determined requirements. By the end of the scheduled Sim Labs, each student has completed a full set of role plays.
Liz this is a terrific description of an example of flexible learning in nursing. I really like the way you have described the various components in the Clinical Skills course, and how they fit under the five dimensions of Flexible Learning. Just when you thought it was done and dusted.....
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it be great if the students could record the role plays for review later on, to remind themselves what they did, and also to give feedback to each other. I know Social Services counseling courses do a lot of this.
The videos could be loaded on a clinical skills channel on Youtube and kept private to the class. Anything longer than 2-3 minutes is a bit big for Moodle. Plus the resources are no longer accessible in third year when students may also need to access them. The videos would also provide a bank of resources (with students' permission of course) for classes who follow. Or they could be loaded on the OP video site - Play OP. Also if the vidoeing of skills like this contributed to assessment, that could save time for both students and lecturers, and class sessions could be practice in doing it. what do you think of this idea?