The perceived benefits of a virtual community: effects of learning style, race, ethnicity, and frequency of use on nursing students.

BACKGROUND: It is important for nursing faculty to consider the variability in learning style among nursing students. AIM: The researchers sought to compare differences in perceived learning benefits among nursing students who had different learning styles and in frequency of use of a virtual community learning intervention. METHOD Using a comparative approach, learning style was measured with the Kolb Learning Style Inventory. Frequency of use and benefit were measured with an exit survey. RESULTS: No differences in perceived benefit were found according to learning style. Subjects with frequent use of the virtual community reported significantly greater learning benefits than those with infrequent use, regardless of learning style. Also found was a statistically significant relationship between Kolb learning-style scores and race or ethnicity. CONCLUSION: All nursing students may potentially benefit from virtual community use.

Competency-based training to create the 21st century mental health workforce: strides, stumbles, and solutions.

In response to sustained concerns about the capability of the mental health workforce, federal groups have urged educators to adopt a competency-based system for training students in core mental health skills. A particular emphasis is training students to work in integrated systems, intervene with evidence-based practice, and employ culturally relevant therapies. Creating such a program, particularly one delivered online, requires structures that engage students in their own learning and tools for tracking competencies. We report on our competency-based graduate psychiatric mental health nursing program and the unique methods used to track student skill development and clinical reasoning.

Learning and engagement with a virtual community by undergraduate nursing students.

Virtual communities are an emerging innovative teaching application in nursing education. The purpose of this multisite study was to examine variables associated with student-perceived benefits and utility among undergraduate nursing students using a virtual community. The study involved 350 student participants enrolled in 5 baccalaureate nursing programs using a virtual community. Data were collected using surveys, with a descriptive and comparative approach for data analysis. The relationship between the use of the virtual community and perceived benefits among learners was substantial: r = .416 (318), p = .000. The utility scale scores were higher among white/Asian students compared with minority students (t = .219, df = 330, p = .03), but there was no difference among students reporting frequent program use. Engagement was greater among minority students than white/Asian among students reporting frequent program use (F = 2.40 [4308], p = .05). Frequency of virtual community use in nursing education appears to be linked to positive learner benefits and engagement. Further research related to learning outcomes associated with virtual community use is needed in nursing education and practice.

Evaluating clinical competence of distant nurse practitioner students.

Developing and evaluating core clinical competencies of nurse practitioner students at distant clinical sites requires dialog among the student, the clinical preceptor and University faculty. Students enter our program with diverse backgrounds, experience and interests. Here we demonstrate an innovative online Clinical Development Scale (CDS) that gathers self assessment data from each student, analyzes, organizes and prioritizes competencies to be accomplished in a clinical practicum, produces midterm and final evaluation summaries from data contributed by both student and preceptor and displays action plans developed by students, for meeting deficient competencies for preceptor and faculty approval.

Advanced practice psychiatric mental health nursing, finding our core: the therapeutic relationship in 21st century.

TOPIC: Increasingly, students from various professional backgrounds are enrolling in Psychiatric Mental Health (PMH) Nursing graduate programs, especially at the post-master's level. Faculty must educate these students to provide increasingly complex care while socializing them as PMH advanced practitioners. PURPOSE: To present how one online program is addressing these issues by reasserting the centrality of the relationship and by assuring it has at least equal footing with the application of a burgeoning knowledge base of neurobiology of mental illness. SOURCES: Published literature from nursing and psychology. CONCLUSIONS: The PMH graduate faculty believes that they have developed strategies to meet this challenge and to help build a PMH workforce that will maintain the centrality of the relationship in PMH practice.

Using a virtual community to enhance cultural awareness.

PURPOSE: Cultural competence is an expectation of professional practice, yet effectively teaching this concept to nursing students is challenging. The purpose of this study was to assess the use of a virtual community as a teaching application to foster cultural awareness among nursing students. METHOD: This correlational study involved the collection of two surveys from 342 first-semester students from five baccalaureate nursing programs that used The Neighborhood virtual community during one semester. Descriptive and comparative analyses were performed. FINDINGS: Results suggest that use of the virtual community may have contributed to cultural awareness among student participants. There was a significant correlation between frequency of use and cultural awareness. Virtual communities may represent a useful teaching application for cultural competence in nursing education. Further research is needed to specifically test cultural competence education strategies using a virtual community platform.

The impact of a virtual community on student engagement and academic performance among baccalaureate nursing students.

The purpose of this article is to present findings from a study which evaluated the effectiveness of a virtual community (an emerging pedagogical application) on student engagement and academic performance. Virtual communities mirror real-life through unfolding patient histories and relationship development over time. Students also become more engaged in learning by creating personally meaningful knowledge of a concept (Rogers & Stone, 2007). Virtual communities offer one teaching strategy to assist students in learning complex, health-related content in a contextualized manner. This quasi-experimental study involved first-semester baccalaureate nursing students enrolled in a course at two campuses of a nursing program at a large university in the Southwest. Three key strategies assessed the impact of the virtual community on student engagement and learning: third-party observational measurement, end-of-class student/faculty surveys, and use of knowledge items in student exams for the class. Significant differences between the control and experimental group were found regarding learning engagement and communication exchanges; the groups appeared similar in ratings of quality of instruction and academic performance. Use of virtual communities can help nursing educators address the recent Carnegie Foundation study's (Benner, Sutphen, Leonard & Day, 2010) counsel to implement "pedagogies of contextualization" in which theoretical and factual information about diseases and conditions are placed in the context of a patient's experience.