Informatics and Technology in Nursing Education

             As I have identified throughout my blog, the world of nursing and nursing education has significantly changed over the last 100 years; although my professional nursing career has only spanned the last 25, I have personally and most specifically witnessed substantial transformation in the use of informatics and technology. 

The Nursing Informatics Competency Self-Assessment is highly recommended in providing a better understanding of personal comprehension of informatics in health care.  Provided by the Nursing Informatics Learning Center,  the assessment identified that I am confident in utilizing personal computer skills to enhance and inspire creativity, as well as perform routine nursing functions within my profession.  The assessment also identified my personal recognition of the importance of using technological information within my chosen profession, as well as the fact that I have a positive perception of the importance of computerized healthcare and nursing applications.  My personal growth in technology and informatics has taken place most recognizably within the last four years of higher nursing education.  Classes such as Informatics and Statistics have offered me the opportunity to visualize the bigger picture and utilize modern technology to comprehend the information at a much more superior level.

Continued education and personal experience has brought me to a place within my career in which I wish to use the skills provided over the years to encourage, engage and prepare a new generation of nurses to flourish in their own careers.  Some of the most modern 21^st century technological teaching and learning strategies that I look most forward to utilizing include clickers in the classroom, Digital Story Telling, MoveNote (my personal favorite), High Fidelity Simulation, and blogging.  These new and innovative advances in technology provide a level of education far beyond traditional nursing education and offer the student the opportunity to obtain, absorb, comprehend, maintain and reflect upon knowledge received throughout and beyond their status as a student.  I also maintain the responsibility to ensure my personal knowledge, teaching qualifications and abilities continue to grow with the rapidly evolving technologies in health care, as offering students a 21^st century learning environment that encompasses modern and up-to-date clinical and technological practices and processes is pertinent to ensuring quality health care across the United States.

Feeding Forward Traditional and Authentic Assessment

          The 21^st century nursing classroom both significantly differs, yet remains quintessentially similar to the late-20^th century nursing classroom with regard to utilization of traditional and authentic assessment.  In 2016, Jon Mueller created the Authentic Assessment Tool Box; however, non-inclusive and without regard to how it might be utilized within nursing education. One of the most interesting pieces of information within “The Tool Box” is the comparison made between traditional and authentic assessment (TABLE ONE), as it is written to the ideals non-utilization of active teaching strategies within a non-technical course curriculum.  

(TABLE ONE)

           Upon review of the defining attributes of each assessment style above, it is quite obvious that if the table is slightly altered, we can effectively recognize the assessment styles currently utilized within theory and simulation/clinical nursing curriculums today (TABLE 2).

Nursing Curriculum Assessment
Theory Assessment Traditional	Clinical Assessment Authentic
·         Selecting a Response ·         Contrived ·         Recall/Recognition ·         Teacher-Structured ·         Indirect Evidence	·         Performing a Task ·         Real-Life ·         Construction/Application ·         Student-Structured ·         Direct Evidence

(TABLE 2)

AllNurses speaks of the idea of utilization of both the traditional and authentic assessment within nursing curriculum for efficiency and monetary reasons.  However, I personally recognize the value to having utilized both types of assessment in the past, as well as the present and future, as they benefit the types of instruction provided within theory, simulation and clinical curriculums.

One of my personal beliefs regarding education is maintenance of an active learning style classroom; I maintain the same view with regard to assessment. Regardless of the assessment type, an instructor must identify ways to bond with each student, as well as an efficient way to feed forward and adapt curriculum instruction to meet the needs of current and future students.  In the 21^st century, utilization of Flipped Learning and modern technology (such as Screencastify) within grading of traditional style curriculum (such as multiple choice exams, essays, etc.) to create an interactive, engaging student-centered approach creates a personal and proactive assessment method.  Application of tools such as this also allow the instructor the ability to monitor and track the feedback provided to each student, note commonalities between students, issues and assessments, and develop a platform in which they might identify portions of curriculum that require revision for future instruction.

Teaching is about being creative and developing active, engaging curriculum that promotes student learning…creating assessments that are included under that same umbrella should be the priority of every future nursing instructor, I know it is one of mine.

Interdisciplinary Learning and Collaboration with Technology

As per the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN), the 21^st century nursing student requires education within an interdisciplinary environment that fosters communication, teamwork, respect, and understanding, as well as joint collaboration to develop goals and make decisions that result in safe, quality patient care with positive outcomes.  

The importance of integrating interdisciplinary staff within nursing course curriculum offers the student the opportunity to learn to utilize and appreciate the importance of the relationship between the different acute and post-acute care departments that care for the patient.  Proper integration of technology within nursing curriculum provides the student with first-hand simulated experiences and situations that may occur within everyday clinical practice involving interdepartmental and interdisciplinary staff members.  Use of simulation laboratories in this manner  (like the one at Drexel University) has proven to be quite beneficial in the development and strengthening of interpersonal skills among students, as it allows the student the opportunity to develop clinical reasoning and critical thinking skills without the potential for clinical error within an actual patient care environment. 

Development of an interdisciplinary team approach, integration of electronic health records and medical administration records, simulation and other modern technologies within nursing curriculum provides nursing students with the framework needed to flourish post-graduation within the clinical environment.  Regardless of the venue a student might choose for employment, introductory teamwork skills ensure a new hire graduate nurse has the basic ability to appropriately communicate and collaborate a patient needs not only interdepartmentally, but also with interdisciplinary teams.  For instance, a new graduate registered nurse may opt for employment within a home health agency.  This nurse would have to have the basic know how to communicate and collaborate the patient care needs with the doctor’s office, and potentially a pharmacy, a medical equipment company, a physical or occupational therapist, a social worker or speech language pathologist in order to provide comprehensive, safe patient care in the home; the same would be true within an acute or post-acute care environment and with regard to the use of modern technologies.

                In conclusion, the more exposure the better….Utilization of modern technology within unique simulation experiences that incorporate interdepartmental and interdisciplinary teams within curriculum is truly required to ensure the growth and continued importance of nursing in healthcare today; it is also relevant to the cost of healthcare, vital to the continuity of safe, quality healthcare, and is insurance that newly graduated nurses are able to provide in the delivery of comprehensive, positive patient outcomes.

Graphic created by S.Bernardini RN, BSN, CPHM on 4.12.17

Interactive Use of Technology in the Nursing Classroom

Teaching in the 21^st century is such an exciting time!  Regardless of the age of the student, the type of education they are receiving or where the student is learning, technology has pointedly transformed the traditional classroom style learning that we all remember so well.  Today’s teacher has the ability to come out from behind the desk, step away from the chalkboard and interact with students in ways that have long surpassed pointing out where a country might be on a pull-down map or demonstrating how to utilize the card catalog; and nursing school is no exception to this rule, in fact, nursing school is the one place technology is now embraced.

With statistics rising with regard to the rise in number of patients, as well as the high number of nursing school applications versus the low number of available placement slots, current technologies have afforded nursing programs worldwide the ability to open up classrooms on a whole new level.  Utilization of online courses, virtual classrooms, and laboratory simulation are all examples of high level technology that has been used to overhaul nursing programs over the last five to ten years.  These big picture innovations, such as the simulation lab used by the Duke University nursing program, allow students opportunities that were never even thought imaginable 15, 30 or 60 years ago, as well as provide nursing instructors with the ability to provide active, out of the box clinical instruction.  Other, less invasive, yet innovative technologies that have assisted in advancing nursing curricula include audio-video tutorials, clickers in the classroom, smart-board technology, and webquest. 

These types of large and small scale interactive teaching/learning tools and strategies continue to drive my desire to teach the technologically savvy 21^st century student, as well as peek my curiosity regarding what type of radical, groundbreaking techniques we will begin utilize over the next five to ten years.  Much like the nurses of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, we are now the new aged pioneers of nursing. Via high level utilization of the internet and other technologies within our classrooms, laboratories and acute and post-acute patient care settings, we are swiftly blazing a trail of highly interactive, new wave, informatic and high-tech advances in nursing curriculum for future nurses and nursing students. 

The video below provides an excellent overview of the advances we are making in education and details the rapid growth in the utilization of technology in education.  With all of the technological advances, I look very forward to what the future brings me as a professor and the abundance of information and ways I can deliver information, provide resources and interact with my students!