I'd like to welcome everyone to this episode of NLN podcast Nursing Edge Unscripted. I'm your host, Dr. Steven Palazzo, a member of the editorial board for nursing education perspectives in this episode we will be discussing the book Teaching Tomorrow's Nurses. This book seeks to guide the nurse educator in creating student learning outcomes using technology integration in the classroom, simulation, and clinical spaces. We are fortunate today to have the authors with
us to discuss aspects of their book. Dr. Jennifer O'Rourke is an associate professor and associate dean of the Parkinson's School of Health Science and Public Health at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Andrew Bobel is an experienced educator and adjunct professor at Widener University School of Nursing in Chester, Pennsylvania. Welcome to you both and thank you for your time today. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us Steve.
Appreciate it. Absolutely. So you know I found your book interesting and lots of great helpful tips. I like how you broke it down into there was like 10 key messages, very specific to the type of technology integration that you were discussing in more detail...The question I have before we get into some of the other questions specifically about the book is I teach a class right now
of 168 students in pathophysiology. How do we use technology and what type of technology effectively in a large class of this size to engage the student learner? Good question, but I do not envy you teaching that many students at one time. I like 25 so I guess I'll start and then Andrew will come in because he can specifically speak to, I know he's assisted faculty to to think about these challenges. There's, I think, there's a variety of different ways you can use
technology for a large class like that. You know, an easy way to use technology is an entry or exit ticket into a classroom. So evaluating some basic knowledge when they come to your class where you quickly as a the educator know maybe what are the gaps in their learning that I want to focus on during my class. And then same thing at the end of the day, you know, at the end of the class. Maybe what are still some of those gaps that you could
then address in follow-up conversation? So you know, a simple poll tool you could use you know depending on your learning management system, those those can be easily built into your platform. But then within the classroom with that large amount of students, and I do not like to
lecture. I do not like to hear myself talk. And so using small breakout rooms so if you're in person just creating those opportunities for students to break into groups or online using you know discussion rooms to create those opportunities for small group discussions, you know, I also like to use problem based learning. So giving a group a problem that needs to be addressed and then they're able to not regurgitate what they read, but actually apply that content to a contextual
situation. And so how they could use technology is a variety of ways. You know, they could use a whiteboard, a simple whiteboard where they're just taking notes on the whiteboard that then is shared with the rest of the class. PowerPoint presentations, you know, and little audio clips. Little video clips they could even create podcasts as students where then they those could be shared with the class. So Andrew, I'll pass it to you because I know you also have ton of examples
like that. Yeah, for sure. I really appreciate that Jenny. I think that you know really good points there. And I, you know, you start off with one of my bread and butter. It's the exit ticket. You know, it's gaining the understanding of the students and checking for their understanding, but also double dipping on informing your own instruction, right? It's where are the gaps but then also what do I need to get better at? A lot of those are again, what do we have at our fingertips?
A lot of us are Office 365 campuses or Google campuses whatever that might be so you create a simple form right and that form is then linked to a QR code that QR code can be published on your PowerPoint, can be bring up brought up at the beginning of class so students can scan and bring that stuff in. Those forms have come a very long way, right. It used to just be that, hey, here's an Excel document and here's all the data that
came along. Now we get all the the AI capabilities inside of those forms so it creates the word cloud for you of the terms that it continuously sees. So when you have that 168 students, which is obviously a lot of columns and rows to look at in an Excel document, you can see those words that are much larger in the word cloud and the emphasis to where you need to put your teaching or where some of those gaps are. I'm also a massive component of any sort of gamification. I you
know. I like to see the students up and moving. I like to see those intrinsic motivators getting going. So you can really point to some of those audience response systems as far as Kahoot, you know, and Poll Everywhere and things like that where you can really get those students engaged. and I think Jenny made a really good point. The rote lecture and the standing in front of you know, that's there's always room for that, right.
That's not going to go anywhere. There's always going to be parts of that, but we need to break up those pieces, right. We live in the TikTok world is what I referred to it as your students aren't sitting there and retaining the things that you're saying in minute 48. They checked out at minute
eight, right. So we have to find these opportunities to get these, this microlearning, right, within the section so is that watching a short video before they come to class and then and then talking about that with a group of students before you come back to the whole group? Are they watching it with a group of students in courses? So a really big component of some of the video aspects that you can kind of put in for some of those large groups,
but it can be tricky especially with the 168. I can understand that you have a little bit more flexibility with the smaller groups, but certainly some of those tools out there that can help with grouping or some of the Socratic questioning as far as calling on students. So I'm a big component of Triptico, which is a product out of England and it's big in the K-12 world, but gives
you a lot of those kind of wheels, right. You can get all the students names on a wheel and you can click spin and it calls on a student or it gets them to group them together. You say five groups, six people and everybody moves around and splits up so it provides a little bit of that visual incentive that kind of goes along with some of the gamification aspects as well. Right. Talk about the, you mentioned the student polling this you know the different Poll Everywhere and Kahoot
has gamification. And I use Slido in the classroom because that's what the university supports. Are they effective tools for engagement? I find that they can be very effective for engagement, but how about for student assessing student learning outcomes? Yeah, I think that you know it's a double-edged sword, right. Just like with any technology, you
don't want death by tech, right. So if you're coming in and you're doing a Poll Everywhere you're doing a Kahoot every class, it loses its pizzazz, right. It's like, "Oh here's another Kahoot. Let's jump into this." But I think it can, you know, outside of just the content, right, especially in our in our BSN program, we're making good test takers too, right. So not only is it learning the content, it's about discussing the question, right. What
are the important parts here? What if we changed, you know, this part of the question stem? What if we changed the age of this client or the or the previous condition that it might be. So not only is it the content and establishing kind of you know following those gaps of knowledge. It's also, okay, what's the question asking? What does this look like? How do I think about this as a good test taker? So I think that you can really hit it
on both edges there. Yeah. I do think it's important though to go back to like the fundamentals, right. So as educators, what we should be doing in the classroom is really about our objectives. So what are we trying to accomplish today? How are we going to evaluate the students actually learned? And so technology is great. I use technology a lot. I won't say I'm the best in terms of like my technology savvy, like I learn as I go, but I'm
not the best. Like I'm not Andrew. But so I choose... I tend to use things that are maybe a little bit more simple right, not super complicated for me as a facilitator. But the key there is - does it make sense for my class? I'm not just going to do a Poll Everywhere every single class because the students will actually by the end will hate you for for using that poll. They won't want to use it again. So I really try to change it up and try something
different. Like, I'll just give you an example. I've used an internal discussion board you know that's built into my platform, but then I've used something called Padlet, which is almost like a live discussion board and the students love that. But sometimes after the third time it's like, no we got to go back to the original one or we have to do...what I, the other thing I've tried is
audio discussion boards. So rather than just write a discussion board they actually have to do a verbal discussion board. So I think you just have to be cognizant. It just goes to your objectives and using technology appropriately in when it's needed. Great. Yeah. I just want to jump in there real quick Jenny to touch on the discussion boards just because again, this is a facet where especially on the grad side we talk about
this, right. It's 500 words, four scholarly sources, respond to someone by Tuesday make another response by Thursday, you know those kinds of things. And again, just like we talked about with the other things, there's room for that, right. You have to be able to clearly write and do all that, but there's also room for articulating
your responses, right. When certainly, when you become an an expert in the field or you become a nurse manager or you're the leader in the room you want to be able to clearly articulate your thoughts and be able to concisely come across with the information you're trying to portray. So that's an area to practice that, right. It's not only about the content and it's okay this is a place where I can practice talking clearly. This is a place I don't need to be so long-winded,
guilty, right. And some of those skills that kind of come along with some of that answering and some of those facets, not just the content- wise, but making a good nurse educator or making a good person and providing feedback bedside. Some of those things can be practiced as a student by giving them multiple ways to respond on some of those discussion board topics, right. Right, you know AI is moving quickly. As we know, it's here. It's
not going anywhere. It's part of our life now and it's going to be increasingly a part of our life. What are your thoughts about the role of AI in the classroom and how can nurse educators use AI tools and approaches effectively for the students and how do our students use it? I mean, I'll tell you what I do with it, but I want to hear what your
thoughts are on it. So it's funny when Andrew and I got started thinking about this book, you know, and conceptualizing it which was two, about two years ago, AI was out there but the difference in how AI has just grown exponentially in two years. So there's some AI in the book, but I'm going to be honest, it was published before we knew a lot of what we know now.
And actually how to incorporate AI so I do try to incorporate AI quite a bit because I truly believe that faculty need...students are using it, so faculty need to get over this, oh we shouldn't be using it. No. Faculty need to know students are using it. Get comfortable using it and learn to be able to use it and integrate it into their courses
so it can be used effectively. And not... and then we don't punish end up punishing students, which I unfortunately, my role as administrator I often have to address in terms of plagiarism with AI and things like that. So I'll just give you some examples of how I've used it and or how my colleagues have used it. So I teach a public health course and students need to develop basically a map like they develop a problem based community project and how they're going to address
that problem. And then they have to kind of map it out how they're like each area and so what I have them do is actually do it on their own as a group and then I have them go into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini and actually say develop a path model for me based on this problem. And it, you know, shoots out in 45 seconds this lovely mode,l but it's not perfect. There's lots of errors you know. And so then the their role is really look at both
of these. What are you missing in yours that maybe the AI tool school did a little bit better job on and really they do some comparing and contrasting. The other way I've done that with literature review writing is tables. You know, our students, we really drill that in develop your lit review table, but sometimes I find that that becomes an exercise and they're not learning just by developing the table. They really need to
understand what's in that table. So you can use AI to help develop those tables for you, but then again, you have them analyze on the end side of that tool what's been developed? Is it accurate? Now I'm going to synthesize this information. So it's a better use of their time, in my opinion. And so I'm sure... and test question development. I'm seeing that
more and more and more. I know there's some ethical issues related to that, but I know Andrew works in in the undergrad program a lot and I'm sure you're using it quite a bit Andrew. Yeah, for sure, really appreciate all those thoughts. And you know we're definitely overlap there right and there's lots of conversations around it. There's multiple webinars every day, you know, whatever you want to watch or listen to it's out there. And I think it's about kind of shifting our
thinking to start, right. We need to embrace this. It's not going anywhere. It's not something that is meant to hurt us, right. It's something that is a tool in our toolbox is what I like to say. And we know that as students and as faculty members and nurse educators and nurse leaders and really any field, it's going to be used right. So it's not going to replace you, but I've heard people say that someone will replace you who's
using it if you're not using it, right. So it's about finding those niches that work best for you and I think that nursing already touches on that, right. We look at the AACN essentials. The domain 8 is informatics and that's got AI right in it right there, so it that's not going anywhere at all. So it's really about how do we use it, how do we embrace it? And again, I can discuss some of the things that I see being done, and
really this is twofold, right. I'm in two roles. I'm both an adviser for my undergraduate students and accelerated students, so some second degree students, so different conversations there of course. But then also working in faculty development. So let me talk about both those ends. From the faculty development side, a lot of places we point to is developing case studies, right. Sometimes those are hard to write. Sometimes those
are hard to get going, things like that. We are a a Microsoft 365 campus so we have Copilot at our fingertips, similar to ChatGPT. It's, you know, the generative AI scope of hey, write me a case study of a 65-year-old man with congenital heart disease who just came in you know with weak knees or
something like that, right. And you can go in and change those variables and all those things and it will write a complete case study for you given, again, just like Jenny touched on, it's a start, right. It's a skeleton so make sure you're going through and make sure those things are there and and that you know what you're seeing is accurate. And you do that as the expert. On the student side, and wow do I have students who are like, how do I
use this, what can I use this for. And particularly I'm working with a bunch of freshmen right now who are in anatomy and physiology 1 and anatomy and physiology 2. And as you can imagine, that gets them starting in their nursing career and some struggle with that first science and kind of grasping that. and one of our conversations was you know I really struggle on tests a lot of the tests are multiple choice questions, but the study guides or things
that we do in class are very open-ended. You know, we don't have multiple choice questions to give to practice or get examples from or things like that. And my response was, well, did you ever try and take one of those open-ended questions and ask your Copilot to create five multiple choice questions from that content? And then that gets the ball rolling and thinking about that and I looked at that with one of my students and she said, "Well."
I said, "Well, what's something you're studying right now?" She said "Joints." I said "Okay, well let's ask Copilot can you create five multiple choice questions on joints?" And here it comes and believe it or not, guess what the first questions were? They were about the joint commissions and
NATO and all of that right. So you have to get a little bit more specific that we're actually talking about the A and P side so then it got into the ball and socket joint and she said, "Oh I remember that." I said "Okay, well here's five specific questions on the ball and socket joint. Maybe
you need a video. Can you give me three videos on that?" It gave me three videos that were all shorter than 5 minutes on that content which again, you could Google search, but you're making your way through all the weeds to find that stuff right. So some of those generative AIs and and the machine learning side can put some of those exemplars at
your fingertips a little bit quicker. So I can say that that's probably the the majority of the way that I'm seeing those being used as both a student and a faculty member. Yeah let me just add sorry one comment on that. I think that it brings up how I'm also seeing students use this is that it's allowing them to create content around
their own learning needs. So as faculty we would give these, you know, study guides that are all written but now students can actually use that and create visuals that help them understand because I'm a visual learner or they create some audio clips or maps, map you can create a concept map so it it allows this universal design for learning to really come through and allow for flexible standardization of and letting the students develop content around their own
needs, which is so important I think for for us in this climate and environment for students. Well, I appreciate you said that because that is the thing I find I'm teaching my students on how to use AI, for my particular course is pathophysiology, is yeah, you know, prompting the generative AI to get to the place that you need to be for where
you're at with the content in the course. I, you know, I really don't care what they use as long as they can understand and apply the concepts and so ChatGPT or whatever, any generative AI tool you use can help that student start from give me a basic you know understanding of heart failure at the level of this and then you can break get it more specific and then, like you said, having them
create questions. And... you know I also say make sure you ask for answers and rationales for those questions and then use that information and fact check it with your slides, your notes, your other things like that to make sure that it's accurate and you're not just relying on the information you're getting from ChatGPT. But you know they download my slides now into ChatGPT and ask them to make flash cards, all kinds of things, which I
think is wonderful. I wish I had that tool when I was in school. You know, someone who wants to make flash cards and I learned from flash cards, that's a great way of prompting some a machine like that. So last thing I want to ask you is what is one technology-enhanced strategy that you would emphasize that nurse educators can put into effect
immediately. So if I was watching this and I'm really pressed for time and I'm overwhelmed, what's one thing we could do in the classroom tomorrow that would make an impact. You want to start there Jenny or you want me to start? I'll let you start. I got to think about that one because there's so many. Yeah. There's a lot out there. I think that probably... You only get to pick one though. I know I only get to pick one. Yes, I'm going to pick one that
falls under a large umbrella, right. And that's embracing the mobile learning side of it right. A lot of times we're sitting in front of a computer or we're sitting at a desktop or even at a laptop but all of us have a device in our hands
at all times, right. So finding those opportunities where we can utilize that device whether it's, you know, using the Quizlet app on the phone or using the Canvas app on the phone or whatever it is to, you know, take it out of just, okay, I need to be in front of a computer to do these things. I point my students that way a lot because a lot of times it's hey, study during the commercial or hey,
study during the ad. Find that little blip of time where you know you can take out and you can do a couple flashcards maybe. You're standing in line at a restaurant or maybe you're sitting at the dining table you know by yourself. So not necessarily having the large device in front of you, but embracing some of those mobile needs. I think that we can put at our fingertips especially in the
higher end right. I think that again, we're very used to the large device so we can embrace those a little bit more right. Thank you. Yeah that's... it's still a hard one. I'm not sure I can answer like what I would do tomorrow because I mean I do use
different types of technology. I think what I would as a faculty what I would go in thinking is using something that first off is flexible use, so it can be used on a computer or mobile doesn't cost any money because most of these AI tools right now do not cost anythingo. But making sure it's not a cost to the student because some of, some of those additional apps are costing students now and that
it's flexible, flexible in use for students. So it's going to meet multiple needs of my students and then me being comfortable and the students
being comfortable with using those tools. The other thing I think is important if you are going to be using ChatGPT is having something clear in your syllabus as faculty so what are the the times when I say you can use it and what are the times when really you shouldn't be using it and how to site it because that's important if you're using it you should be citing it 100%. So maybe just more tools around how to use it great. I appreciate that.
Well, I want to thank both of you for joining us. I appreciate your time and expertise and broadening our understanding of this work and how we can enhance the integration of technology into our current classroom settings. To our listeners, if you have not had the opportunity please look for the author's work, "Teaching Tomorrow's Nurses." You can go to the NLN's website type in NLN bookstore and it'll be right there for you to peruse and purchase. Anything you want to say any
last minute or last messages? Just say get started using it. Start trying. You're not going to break anything. Just, you know, have fun with it. Embrace it. Absolutely. Thanks for having us today Steve. Yeah.