Archive for the ‘online nurse practitioner education’ Category
How Technology Has Radically Changed A Nursing Education
Technology changes the way people do everything. It changes the way people live their lives and the way they think. When it comes to nursing educations, technology has had some dramatic impact there too. Here is how technology has radically changed the way students learn to be nurses.
Electronic Presentations
Electronic presentations have taken the place of whiteboards in many nursing classrooms. While whiteboards still abound, the existence of electronic presentations revolutionizes nursing educations. Instead of just looking at words, students can now see images come to life whether they are diagrams or videos of real people. Instead of classes being dry, they now have the potential to be exciting. This is a far cry from earlier days when images were lifeless figures on a page or a whiteboard. Or even a chalkboard.
Online Libraries
Online libraries give students access to so much more information than they had before while making it easier to obtain information too. Instead of making a trek to the school library to find the appropriate text and making copies of the needed pages, now nursing students can just visit an online library. This one development has made learning in general so much simpler.
Online Research
Even beyond online libraries that schools have compiled, nursing students can do research online anytime. Again, there is no need to travel to a library building. Whenever nursing students want to know anything for any reason they can just look it up online.
Email Communication
Email communication is another big change because it allows a school to communicate with its students effortlessly as often as needed. While it may have been difficult before to make announcements to the entire nursing class of a school, now all someone has to do is send out a mass email to the school’s mailing list. This may not sound like much of a change but if students or even teachers need to know something then this is a much easier way to disperse messages than trying to call every teacher or notify every student some other way.
Long Distance Learning
A noticeable change in nursing education that was brought about by technology was the introduction of long distance learning. This can, of course, be done using online classes and that is a change but there’s more. With webcams and such technology, now nursing students can attend lectures from afar. Instead of having to limit attendance to an event or making students drive to the place where it is being held, students can now just go to their own school and watch a lecture that is being given somewhere far away. This allows more students to attend classes which could be the beginning of an answer to the question of how to get more nurses attending nursing school in order to alleviate the nursing shortage.
These are some of the ways that technology has radically changed a nursing education. While technology brings problems, like figuring out how to use it effectively, it has vastly improved nursing education. As more technology becomes available and as more schools embrace the technology that is out now, the improvements are sure to keep coming.
T. Rheinecker enjoys discussing ways to gain admission to academic institutions offering online nurse practitioner education programs.