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Monday, 18 November 2013
Learning Objective 1: Learners will be able to describe some of the ways students demonstrate leadership learning outcomes in the online classroom.
Learning Objective 2: Learners will be able to discuss ways to facilitate nursing administration student role socialization, as part of learning, in the online environment.
The online classroom of today differs from the “traditional” asynchronous discussion classroom of a decade ago. Increases in Internet accessibility and bandwidth enable the application of video and synchronous communication in the online classroom but, as with so many educational efforts, little research is conducted to determine the effect these technologies have on learning outcomes. Graduate nursing education has moved online for many schools and students, in both purely online and hybrid classroom offerings. But the common feature for much online learning is still asynchronous discussion. I studied the asynchronous discussion produced by a cohort of nursing administration students to find out if and how they learned to be nurse administrators. I used the tool of sociolinguistic research called discourse analysis to examine the classroom discussion between students during a nine month period. What I found was the ways in which students enacted identities and experimented with their emergent professional selves. They evidenced professional role socialization in discussion through observation, using the discussions to share their successes and failures at applying newly learned nursing administration theories and concepts to their work contexts; experimentation or “trying out” the identity of the nurse administrator, using the language of the field, and evidencing an ever broadening perspective of the entire healthcare delivery system; and evaluative reflecting, sharing the anxiety and tension of changing professional identities often by reframing their ideas about caring and advocacy while working to maintain their identity as “nurses.”
Though it is always tempting to adopt new and exciting technologies, this study showed that the online asynchronous discussion provided students with a richly contextualized environment for learning and a place to develop nursing knowledge. This “traditional” online classroom tool may be an important means of encouraging student learning in terms of professional role socialization