Technology as a teaching/learning strategy for workplace experience in nursing : complementary or contradictory perspectives?

Work integrated learning, or clinical education, has long beena part of undergraduate nursing courses. GHowever, the increasing work intensity of many clinical environments combined with ongoing challenges regarding the availability of placements, calls for aditional teaching strategies to support the development of work-readiness for practice. This prasentation will describe a suite of online scenarios that are designed to complement and extend the clinical placement experience of undergraduate nursing students. It also examines technology as a rpactical strategy for achieving enhanced pedagogical outcomes in this are af the undergraduate curriculum. The scenarios are built around four key Decision Points. Each scenario is supported by a range of on-line resources that include authentic patient documentation, policy and professional guidelines/requirements etc. studnets can also consult with virtual experts as they make their decisions. Multiple choice tests are included with each scenario and students are erquired to work through these until they achieve 100% accuracy. The complexity of the scenarios increases from Year 1 to Year 3 with incrementally higher expectations in relation to the types of decisions that need to be made. Students are also provided with an opportunity to recognise mistakes, and to determine how they would respond to such issues. serial evaluations conducted over the past three years are uniformly positive, although have raised a number iof issues regarding better ways to use electronic strategies such as these in our teaching with students. Reflections on the usage of a blended environment in which technology and the workplace converge to enhance students' learning outcomes and the development of work-readiness for practice are offered