ENHANCING CLINICAL PRACTICE LEARNING AT A DISTANCE.

Maintaining student-university connection from coast to outback

With more than 23,000 students and 1,700 staff from across 90 different countries, Murdoch University, situated in Western Australia, is a global centre for learning, teaching, research and industry. For this project, existing PebblePad use embedded throughout the Bachelor of Nursing was enhanced by utilising video reflections within a blog for connection between remotely placed students and their university facilitators.

The 'Supporting Students At A Distance' Ambition 

During the three-year Murdoch University Bachelor of Nursing course, nursing students are required to successfully complete seven work-integrated learning clinical placement units. Approximately 300 MU nursing students undertake a rural or remote WIL clinical placement per year and may travel up to 3000 km to attend placement. A difficulty is that the Murdoch Clinical Nurse Facilitator monitoring the student’s progress is rarely located in the same physical location as the student and internet connectivity in rural and remote locations cannot always be relied upon.

Students have been utilising a digital clinical eportfolio using PebblePad and the PebblePocket app to record clinical competence whilst on clinical placements for several years. Following the successful implementation of the clinical eportfolio, an opportunity to increase the connection to, and support of, students in rural and remote areas was seen in the use of the blog feature in PebblePad, and incorporating video to add deeper personal connection. 

The Successful Workflow

The inclusion of Video blogs - ‘vlogs’ –into the clinical eportfolios for those students attending rural and remote placements was a co-design developed through discussion with students. The reflective components of regulatory assessments have been modified from the traditional written format and students are instead asked to create vlogs using the video function in PebblePocket to document clinical experiences. They upload the video in their PebblePad blog, which is shared with their university-based clinical nursing facilitator. Students are also encouraged to share the clinical eportfolio with the site assessors, as they were required to create a video ‘elevator pitch’ describing their reasons for wanting to undertake the remote placements as part of the selection process.

The video provides an overview of how PebblePad is embedded throughput the entire bachelor of Nursing at Murdoch University