Using Technology to Enhance Student Learning

Innovative educational strategies are needed to better prepare nurses to succeed in complex healthcare environments where quality and safety are paramount. Virtual reality software and environments such as Second Life® (SL) hold potential as part of the solution by providing an innovative and interactive platform for educational experiences that simulate real world situations. This platform offers opportunities to utilize the virtual world to expose nursing students to learning in a new way. The second part of the symposium will describe how the virtual platform of Second Life was utilized for simulated role-play ambulatory care clinical experiences. The literature surrounding the use of virtual worlds for ambulatory care simulations and the development of the Ambulatory Care experiences that took place in the virtual platform of Second Life will be presented. Advances in virtual education have created an environment that presents new opportunities to help foster positive student learning and exploration; such innovations can be implemented to aid in teaching patient-centered care coordination. The PCCC curricula utilized a variety of learning platforms to provide for diverse learning experiences. The learning platforms included face-to-face patient interaction, virtual simulation, use of an electronic health record (EHR), case-based analysis, telehealth, and observational experiences. The focus of this presentation is to describe the virtual ambulatory care clinic (Second Life) experience within the context of the five PCCC learning modules. For this module, students created online avatars and engaged in an experience where they discussed concerns that accompanied clinic visits; including heart failure, diabetes, and depression. Student preparation for the virtual experience took place via a simulated electronic health record. The process of the virtual role-play simulation itself, including the facilitator’s role will be discussed during this presentation. The virtual simulation role-play experience also gave students the opportunity to practice their phone-triage skills through the use a virtual role-play experience where they handled a patient phone call situation. Students found this experience to enhance the professional nursing role of patient educator. At the end of their experience, students completed a teaching plan, which further expanded the learning about the role of patient educator. Focus group discussions of the use of this technology reported enhanced learning.