Improving Undergraduate Student Engagement in a Hybrid Research Course

Undergraduate nursing students have traditionally struggled to appreciate and understand research. Traditional teaching and learning methods in the research classroom are not meeting the needs of current students (McCurry & Martins, 2010), and innovations must be sought to overcome students\u27 resistance to research. Efforts to improve the early research utilization skills and attitudes of students is critical if we are to hope for the grounding of their future practice in evidence. To engage students in one hybrid research course, the faculty member created an innovative “March Madness” assignment that assists students in applying their learning. This article details how students engage in collaboration and friendly competition to implement critical research appraisal

Innovative Lesson Plans for Active Learning: Teaching Nursing Research and Evidence-Based Practice

Innovative Lessons Plans for Active Learning: Teaching Research and Evidence-Based Practice is a resource in research and evidence-based practice for active learning in the undergraduate nursing classroom. It is meant to supplement any nursing research text. Designed to provide educators with creative teaching ideas, this text includes a variety of lessons on nursing research topics. Topics include bias, measurement, sampling, theory and more. Lessons provide active learning for in-class, hybrid, and online formats. Each lesson includes objectives, overview, and detailed steps. As an open access resource, the text is continuously in-process. Designed to be independent of any published text, the book compliments any nursing research and evidence-based course. This text is also a suitable resource for introductory research in other disciplines. Each chapter is an activity designed to supplement didactic andragogy. The activities develop creativity and facilitate engagement in the nursing research content. Through creative engagement, students access learning areas of the brain that otherwise remain unstimulated. Organized by the order in which they might be discussed in class, each chapter builds upon previous learning. In chapter two students are introduced by creating puppets to develop research questions and study ideas. Chapter three focuses specifically on generating problem and purpose statements. Culture shots in chapter five engages students in understanding theory generation, qualitative research and ethics in data collection. Chapters six and seven build upon and strengthen theory understanding through creating concepts and challenging assumptions. In chapter eight, biases and threats to validity are investigated through the use of parody. Sampling is addressed in chapters nine through eleven. Chapter twelve reinforces learning on measurement error. The last four chapters use creative games to help students pull it all together. Chapters thirteen and fourteen utilize existing free resources to enhance the learning experience. Chapters fifteen and sixteen allow students to work together to create understanding for themselves and other students. We hope you enjoy the book as much as we enjoyed creating it. We would love to hear your comment and ideas for improvement. Please also view our video introduction at https://youtu.be/x9NDv2H_Cdg.https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/books/1016/thumbnail.jp

Establishing Open Teaching Tools: A Faculty Journey with Open Educational Resources

Nursing faculty strive to engage students; however, many may have competing priorities that reduce their available time to produce high-quality lessons. Novice faculty facing role transition, some without formal preparation as educators, may be especially susceptible to these time constraints. Open educational resources (OER), educational materials openly licensed for free access and use, are growing rapidly and can play a role in filling this gap. Specifically, open teaching tools are a subset of OER that can help meet this faculty need for engaging lessons with limited resources. Open teaching tools are teaching resources rather than student-learning resources. They allow expert faculty to share knowledge, expertise, and strategies with novice educators to help meet educational outcomes. Literature about OER in nursing education is limited,1 and the literature related to open teaching tools is especially lacking. Through more visible dialogue regarding open teaching tools in nursing, faculty can start to break down some barriers to their use, including quality concerns, difficulty finding open teaching tools, and perceived lack of existence. Embracing OER, especially open teaching tools, provides nurse educators an achievable route to help meet the challenge of curating engaging, interactive content. Open teaching tools benefit student learning and also faculty scholarly engagement. While they may yet lie beyond traditional views of academic scholarship, embracing open teaching tools as innovative scholarly work helps faculty justify the time spent in these OER endeavors as both teaching and scholarship effort. This article describes the creation and impact of an open teaching tool and demonstrates how open teaching tools can be a scholarly endeavor for nursing faculty