The last national conference I went to was for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, so the organization, offerings, and generally off-beat personalities of psych nurses made this a much different experience and a winner from the get-go. I tend to feel more in-sync with my nursing colleagues since they seem much more tolerant of CAM practitioners than CAM practitioners seem of western healthcare. Plus, no political booths!
Online Course for Optimum Student Learning
The current institution in which I work is not, shall we say, one that is full of early adopters. Even with the economy falling apart, older nurses not retiring at an expected rate, and more people considering nursing as a steady career, there is and will continue to be a national nursing shortage for many years. If the healthcare bill goes on as planned, ARNPs are also going to be in demand and already are in certain areas. As an X-er, I am comfortable with the boomer lecture style and the millenial tech-enhanced delivery of education, but the world is moving to more hybrid and fully web-based systems and we have to adapt what works in the class to work on the web.
This course left me saturated in ideas about constructing online courses and enriching the in-class experience beyond providing information. We also discussed VARK and constructed an MSE module to target a variety of learning styles. This was an excellent opportunity to get into groups, share challenges, and pick-each other's brains. Almost no one at the session was from Louisville, so the groups were laden with fresh ideas from all over the country. I have been using blogs for clinical, but this went into the details of what constitutes a good design where the student gets equal or more content then lecture style.
I was able to get some one-on-one time after lunch with Dr. Merrie Kass, who walked me through some of her courses at University of Minnesota. It brought home the overwhelming reality of the work involved in constructing a quality course, online or otherwise. I received excellent guidance on designing on-line and on-line hybrid courses and tossed around ideas on how to make assignments feel relevant rather than feeling like "busy work."
The collaboration is one of the best things about being in Psych as a nurse. There is always some degree of posturing, but the "I'm better than you" feeling is not nearly as pervasive as it is in other specialties. And from LPN to PhD, nursing can get pretty catty!
Key-Note CD
For $50 you can get every lecture from the conference in voice over power-point with the ablity to earn an extra 32 hours of CEU credit. You can upload it to a smart phone from your computer too. Yaoza! There are a few on here I will likely adapt for my classes.
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