Nordic Forum for Nurse Educators (NFNE)
In May 2022, an abstract has been accepted for the Nordic Forum for Nurse Educators (NFNE) that was held in November 2022 in Turku, Finland. The target audience was mainly educators, researchers and students. The dissemination at this event is international/EU/outside the project consortium with a focus on Nordic countries. The presentation at NFNE will focus on our journey from traditional skills assessment to assessment using video-based and AI technologies. NFNE was chosen as a dissemination channel as DCU has existing Erasmus staff / student exchanges with the host organization, Turku University of Applied Sciences.
Title: Our journey from traditional OSCEs to skills assessment using videos and Artificial Intelligence technology
Background: This abstract will show our journey and our perspectives on skills teaching and learning in the era of digitalisation. The context is set within Dublin City University (DCU) of Ireland where pre-registration nursing education is at Bachelor’s degree level since 2002.
A key issue in nursing education is developing basic clinical skills prior to actual patient care. Clinical skills in nursing rely on procedural knowledge, which should be easily transferred to real-world problem-solving situations. Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have been well researched as an assessment practice and also offer opportunities for students to practice clinical skills in a safe environment acting as a bridge towards clinical practice (Farahat et al. 2016). OSCEs have been utilised in DCU School of Nursing, Psychotherapy and Community Health (SNPCH) to assess various infection, prevention and control (IPC) skills such as handwashing on the first year ‘Core Nursing Skills’ module.
Whilst video-based OSCE assessments were developed over the past decade, their use became crucial during the past two years, hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Students recorded their skills on a platform called ‘Unicam’ video-capture system. They uploaded their self-recorded videos to their Moodle-based learning platform, thus enabling them to additionally self-assess their own performances, increasing the educational value and formative uses (Solà-Pola et al. 2020). Direct feedback and grading was provided by the lecturer by way of an online rubric.
The Erasmus+ funded project: Assessment in Healthcare EducAtion goes Digital ‘AHEAD’ is a recent addition which aims at enhancing digital assessment in the field of healthcare education across four European countries (Ireland, Germany, Georgia and Poland). The project is led by DCU’s School of Nursing, Psychotherapy and Community Health. It mainly relates to area 3 and 4 of the European Framework for Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu): (iii) teaching and learning and (iv) assessment. A video-based assessment for hand washing using Artificial Intelligence and including an open source digital badge as evidence of achievement are currently being created and tested to further develop digitalisation in nursing education. The impacts at local level include enhanced digital skills for lecturers and students and the availability of digital assessment tools between higher education- and hospital learning environments. The enhanced digital skills and assessment tools will be available well beyond the current Covid-19 pandemic.
References
Farahat E, Javaherian-Dysinger H, Rice G, Schneider L, Daher N, Heine N. (2016) Exploring Students' Perceptions of the Educational Value of Formative Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) in a Nutrition Program. Journal of Allied Health, 45(1):20-6. PMID: 26937878.
Solà-Pola, Morin-Fraile, V., Fabrellas-Padrés, N., Raurell-Torreda, M., Guanter-Peris, L., Guix-Comellas, E., & Pulpón-Segura, A. M. (2020). The usefulness and acceptance of the OSCE in nursing schools. Nurse Education in Practice, 43, 102736–102736. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2020.102736