Technology
Technology
Tweet Talk
# WeNurses
How one university has turned to social media to teach evidence-based nursing.
Caleb Ferguson interviewed by Dallas Bastian
An Australian university has swapped traditional journal clubs for a Twitter-based group to improve students’ engagement with evidence-based practice.
A research team from the University of Technology Sydney, led by Dr Caleb Ferguson from the Faculty of Health, evaluated the new approach to learning about evidence-based practice.
The authors of the study said:“ Given new flipped and blended approaches to teaching and learning, there is need to rejuvenate how research is utilised and integrated within journal clubs to maximise engagement and translation of evidence.”
They added that online journal clubs are not a new phenomenon and pointed to social media-based clubs currently used by nurses across the world, including Twitter-based discussion group WeNurses, which was launched in 2012 by UK registered nurse Teresa Chinn.“ Since [ then ], this global Twitter nursing community has grown exponentially, and continues to host weekly Twitterchats on different topics such as handover, infection prevention, communication and compassion,” the paper read.
Nursing Review sat down with Ferguson to discuss how the university’ s club was run and to learn more about the way nurses were using social media-based discussion groups.
NR: Why did you decide to look at a new way to run a journal club? CF: At UTS we have a subject in both the undergraduate curriculum for nursing and postgraduate curriculum. It’ s called Evidence Based Practice. The subject is one whereby students learn about evidence-based practice and how to critically appraise different types of evidence and incorporate that into their everyday practice within the healthcare setting.
[ Students ] learn about different types of evidence, including different study designs and how to interpret the different studies that are available, to inform their practice and [ delivery of ] healthcare. To date, there has been a lot of mixed reviews in terms of how students actually learn within these types of subjects. Traditionally students find these types of subjects quite dry and quite boring.
To date, a lot of the teaching around these subjects tends to be quite didactic within the classroom. We used to sit with students within the classroom environment and read different types of articles and go through some of the hallmark areas of studies and really discuss and unpack studies [ examining ] the design of different studies and how to interpret findings of studies, and then how to apply these in practice. As you can imagine, sitting in a classroom and with a group of students reading some papers and talking about study design may not have been the most exciting classroom experience for students.
So there’ s really a need to address how we taught this subject, and this is also part of a university-wide teaching and learning strategy to move towards the model of learning we call‘ flipped learning’, which includes recognising that students learn in a lot of different ways, such as outside of the classroom and through different types of digital media.
The club used Twitter as its primary site. Why was that platform selected? I’ m quite a Twitter fanatic and advocate. I’ ve been on Twitter for a long time as a teacher and as an educator, and as a researcher and a clinician, so I’ m quite pro-Twitter’ s use in healthcare and nurse education. One of the great things about Twitter is its flexibility. There’ s been a lot of studies published where they’ ve used this as a medium for teaching and learning, both within the classroom and outside the classroom, with students.
We were quite keen to explore using this for students and applying that to their learning experience. We thought we’ d really give it a go, and I think it was met with quite a lot of enthusiasm. They really enjoyed it the first time that we undertook the activity – there was quite a lot of positive feedback, which was really exciting to see.
What are some of the key differences to traditional journal clubs? This approach was inspired by the WeNurses global Twitter chat community that was formed by an agency nurse called Teresa Chinn, who found that her work was actually quite lonely. She didn’ t have time to discuss with any of her peers or colleagues some of the professional issues she was facing.
So she took to Twitter and formed a weekly scheduled chat using # WeNurses. It’ s really grown into this global connected community of nurses who get together regularly and chat about different professional topics.
Previously we taught evidence-based practice [ using a model whereby ] students would come to university, they’ d sit in a lecture theatre and listen to the lecturer talking about different types of evidence and different types of study design. Then in the afternoon we would usually have a workshop.
Typically, students would workshop through a structured physical appraisal or CASP [ Critical Appraisal Skills Programme ] tool. It’ s a structured paper or web-based tool. Students can work through 10 questions and review an article and answer those questions. We would work with students in a small group activity, to look at some of the really important features of a research article, and go through a really in-depth quality appraisal of that evidence.
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