Search Toggle

You are here

Focus on Health

Headshot

Engaging Today’s Nurse Learner: An Educator on a Mission 

By: Renee Davis, MSN, RN-BC 

Learner engagement. Learner experience.  Active learning.  Learner centric. Tech centric.  These are all trending terms that are sweeping the learning and development space, and are even more relevant in health care education, specifically, clinical nursing professional development and nursing education in academia.  As Educators working in an ever-evolving healthcare climate, we are struggling to meet the needs of today’s modern learner. Nurse educators are challenged with incorporating best teaching approaches, while simultaneously trying to keep the learner engaged to garner the best learning outcomes. Today’s learner is expecting that their learning experience will mirror that of their constant, on the go lives, with an education that can be accessed anywhere, anytime.  What are some other things that we know?  

  1. We know that in order for nurses and nursing students to provide safe patient care, they need to learn from their education; in order to learn, they need to be engaged. 

  1. We know that one’s engagement in their learning has a direct correlation to the increase in their motivation to learn and knowledge retention 

  1. We know that technology is not going anywhere, and we need to leverage educational technology tools and design strategies, to maintain a level of nurse learner engagement that meets them where they are in their educational journey. 

Armed with this knowledge, it has been my mission as a Nursing Professional Development Specialist, Consultant and Online Adjunct Educator, to explore and integrate a variety of teaching and learning methodologies for my staff and students. I want to engage our nurse learners and empower other Nurse Educators in both Professional Development and Academia to do the same, through the increased, purposeful integration of educational technology and design strategies 

My mission began with 2 memorable teaching experiences. The first being in my former role when I worked with a team of highly skilled Nursing Professional Development Practitioners.  We conducted a centralized, system-wide, interprofessional, clinical orientation, for a large health system here NY.  We had an average of 50-100 new hire orientees on a bi-weekly basis, and the majority (at least 80%) were new graduate Nurses. It was realized pretty quickly that we needed to get creative and innovative with how we delivered our education.  We were now in the age of the modern learner and previous modes of content delivery were not producing the competency and validation outcomes we wanted to see nor what our hospital site leaders needed to see.  The other experience was while teaching a Nursing capstone class at a private university. The class was held in the Spring semester, on a Friday, for 6 hours. The one realization that transcended for both situations was the fact that these students and clinicians were tethered to their mobile devices. I needed to figure out ways to use their devices for an educational purpose. 

After implementing strategies such as gamification, mobile learning, starting to use elements of instructional design such as Backward Design, designing the layout of your course with the end in mind, it was evident that today’s nurse learners deserve an education that incorporates new learning strategies and technologies. The resounding implications are that Nurse Educators need to step out of the comfort zone of owning the content, we need to shift from being the “knowledge disseminators to learning facilitators”.  In academia, if we want to see the knowledge transfer from the classroom to actual clinical application with patients, we need to do better for our students.  We need to think differently and challenge the status quo. We need to continue to sharpen our saw, not just for our benefit of learning different ways of teaching, but for the students as well.   

We are in the midst of an education evolution and Nurse Educators need to be at the cusp, by enhancing our own skill sets and changing our mindset to appreciate the learner experience which can foster an increase in learner satisfaction, content retention, and learner motivation, all leading to improved learner and patient outcomes.  

Renee is a Certified Nursing Professional Development Specialist. She is also the CEO and Founder of ProDevo Design and Consulting, where she is a Nursing Professional Development and Education Consultant. In her work outside of ProDevo, she is a proud Adjunct Online Lecturer for CUNY SPS RN-BSN Nursing Program.