Technology and teaching: Avoiding the pitfalls, increasing student engagement, and improving outcomes

Abstract

In an ever-changing educational landscape challenged by rapidly evolving technological advances, nursing educators are challenged to incorporate their best teaching approaches in the classroom and beyond to ensure student engagement and best learning outcomes. Innovation is then balanced with student needs and learning styles. As we respond to the demands of an ever changing health care environment and a new generation of nursing students with a variety of learning styles, we focused our efforts to help these students incorporate challenging material and use their critical thinking skills. We also focused on developing their roles as nurse practitioners who utilize the latest evidence based practice. At the same time, we are trying daily to avoid the educational pitfalls of the past, and to transform curriculum to meet the needs of the students and the pediatric population they will serve. Adapting new technologies should be carefully weighed against the traditional methods of lecturing. Increasingly, hybrid courses, a combination of teaching in the digital environment (online) and face-to-face interaction between students and faculty, are proving to be very effective, and the student feedback regarding this teaching method is overwhelmingly positive. In this article, we share some of our best practices to teaching in this hybrid, digital environment.

Predicting Student Satisfaction and Outcomes in Online Courses Using Learning Activity Indicators

“…There are numerous empirical studies published in scholarly peer-reviewed journals beyond the scope of learning analytics where researchers have found statistically significant links between student performance in online courses and activity-related factors (Blumenthal et al, 2014;Chang, Wu, Kuo & You3, 2012;Farrington, 2014;Gibson & Dunning, 2012;Hu, Lo & Shih, 2014;Kaufman & Schunn, 2011;Lu & Law, 2012;Lu & Zhang, 2012;Mirriahi & Alonzo, 2015;Pombo & Talaia, 2012;Russell, 2015;Shih, 2011;Strang, 2010Strang, , 2011Strang, , 2013aThomas, Reyes & Blumling, 2014;Wichadee, 2014;Zacharis, 2015). Thus, there may be relevant concepts in other domains that show how student activity in online courses may be related to estimating performance as well as how that knowledge could be applied to improve teaching.…”

Meeting the needs of pediatric nurse practitioner students today: Challenges of implementing a new curriculum

“…[14] And as the role of the pediatric nurse practitioner continues to encompass more challenging competencies and is further refined, the needs of current students have to be constantly reassessed and updated. While we experienced our own set of challenges putting our new curriculum in place, the use of rapid change cycles, consideration of student evaluations, the implementation of new ideas, and collaborations with interprofessional colleagues helped lead to success as well as student/faculty satisfaction.…”

Can online student performance be forecasted by learning analytics?

“…There are numerous empirical studies published in scholarly peer-reviewed journals beyond the scope of learning analytics where researchers have found statistically significant links between student performance in online courses and activity-related factors (Blumenthal et al, 2014;Chang et al, 2012;Farrington, 2014;Gibson and Dunning, 2012;Hu, Lo and Shih, 2014;Kaufman and Schunn, 2011;Lu and Law, 2012;Lu and Zhang, 2012;Mirriahi and Alonzo, 2015;Pombo and Talaia, 2012;Russell, 2015;Shih, 2011;Strang, 2010Strang, , 2011Strang, , 2013aThomas, Reyes and Blumling, 2014;Wichadee, 2014;Zacharis, 2015). Thus, there may be relevant concepts in other domains that show how student activity in online courses may be related to estimating performance as well as how that knowledge could be applied to improve teaching.…”