This session will present evaluation results from the rapid conversion of traditional to the online learning environment that occurred in an undergraduate nursing course. Through discussion, electronic audience response systems, and case studies, we will reveal our lessons learned to prepare you to make the transition to online learning.
Rapidly transitioning highly individualized, on-campus courses with clinical components to all-online learning can be daunting and feel like a crisis to faculty and students alike. I will show you how I successfully transitioned an in-person undergraduate nursing course on high-risk newborn patients -- a course that absolutely depends on highly individualized instruction—to an online modality. Several basic constructs need to be included in the online learning management system (LMS) for educators transitioning courses from traditional to online environments. The LMS should include core criteria, such as course syllabus, course organizer, course announcements, and instructions for submitting assignments electronically. As faculty, you will become familiar with virtual conference platforms, which are almost always embedded within your LMS. This will allow you to facilitate live virtual sessions in the form of live lectures or FAQ sessions. Many virtual conference platforms allow for other useful tools, such as polling, sharing the computer screen, recording live sessions for repeated viewing, and the ability for students to speak via their own microphones and web cameras. This infrastructure emulates as much of the traditional classroom as possible to engage students, especially in regard to responding to unique student questions. My team used the whiteboard in Blackboard Collaborate to facilitate live virtual lectures with Socratic-style questioning. Additionally, a peer-reviewed unfolding case study on high-risk newborn content provided more information to students with regard to the pathological process in the newborn and appropriate nursing interventions. For future conversions, educators can consult their go-to discipline-specific professional organizations for use of available case studies or other learning activities when approaching content. If none exist, we encourage educators to write their own case studies or active learning assignments and have them peer-reviewed by an appropriate professional organization. Lastly, we used designated online testing software for summative objective assessments in the form of unit exams. We were able to compare these exams to a cohort of students who received traditional-style, face-to-face lecture prior to the novel COVID-19 virus. For this evaluation, our team used a Mann Whitney U test to compare item difficulty values on 8 high-risk newborn, content-specific questions on a unit exam between a traditional cohort (control) and a completely online cohort (intervention). There was no significant difference in the item difficulty values on the content-specific unit exam items between the traditional cohort (Md = .83, n = 59) and virtual cohort (Md = 0.84, n = 52), U = 21.5, z = -1.11, p < .268, r = .02. Additionally, student satisfaction from course evaluations showed a statistically significant improvement from the traditional cohort (Md = 4.53, n = 57) to the virtual cohort (Md = 4.7, n = 53), U = 58.50, z = -2.26, p < 0.24, r = .04. This small retrospective study shows one instance in which the rapid transition from traditional to completely online instruction did not disrupt student learning or performance and actually enhanced student satisfaction. Several lessons were learned: Students still require our time during a transition such as this. My students greatly appreciated learning through live virtual lectures and FAQs. The virtual live sessions gave them a sense of connectedness during a situation in which every facet of their learning environment seemed undone. Students also appreciated the use of online tools, such as Whiteboard in Blackboard Collaborate. This style of online teaching will allow you, as the instructor, to retain a strong sense of instructional presence and autonomy within your new online classroom. Your students, too, will appreciate the structure and order that mirrors your previous, on-campus teaching. My students needed to continue to further their learning by participating in class discussions centered around real, high-risk, patient-care scenarios. For example, my students answered questions about pathophysiology and nursing interventions for the high-risk newborn, while I continued to offer in-depth, on-going feedback to scaffold individual knowledge gaps and learning goals. Conduits for maintaining active student participation included interactive teaching and learning techniques for remote-based learners and teachers alike. Importantly, the use of live virtual sessions, when paired with the whiteboard in Blackboard Collaborate, allowed me to continue to support the visual and auditory learning preferences of many of my learners. In fact, the new online format may have better-served the learning styles of my diverse students, many of which I found difficult to meet within the confounds of the on-campus classroom setting. I look forward to showing you how to use discussion, electronic response systems, and visual screenshots of various learning modalities, all of which you can easily acquire when moving your classroom to the online learning modality. You will love using electronic response systems to fully-engage engage your students. These response systems will allow students to share and reflect upon their unique experiences (in my case, clinical experiences with high-risk newborns), and allow students to expeditiously apply didactic information into real-world settings. Through the use of patience, student support, and active online learning strategies, the transition to online and blended learning environments can be effective in supporting student learning, performance, and satisfaction.