Professor Ray Jones – @rjonesplymough
Plymouth University
Background: Nursing students need to use social media professionally, avoiding pitfalls but using learning opportunities.
Design: This case study presents the experience of introducing Digital Professionalism (including Twitter) (i) as an option for second and third year nurses in September 2014, (ii) with a small element of assessment with a first cohort of 450 first year students in October 2014; (iii) Based on feedback, methods have been revised for further cohorts in February 2015, October 2015, February 2016, and (to come) October 2016. By the conference over 1600 nursing students at our university will have been introduced to Twitter in the context of Digital Professionalism.
Methods: Students received a face-to-face lecture, two webinars, used chat rooms or discussion forums and were asked to set up their individual course Twitter accounts and were assessed on their use of these digital environments. Students completed feedback questionnaires at the end of this introductory course including ratings and open end questions seeking comments. After this introduction further use is completely optional. Students are encouraged to join the ‘curation team’ for the course account.
Results: Few second and third students started optional use of Twitter. Nearly all first years for whom Twitter was part of Digital Professionalism assessment used it. The proportion of students that thought inclusion of Twitter was worthwhile increased from first to later cohorts with most students thinking it worthwhile and learning something from its use. Changes from first to later cohorts included better peer-peer support, more contextualisation in ‘Digital Professionalism’, and more emphasis on nursing communities. The presentation will include the latest feedback data from students (including October 2016) and an analysis of students’ comments. These include many where students were surprised to be asked to use Twitter, and would not have expected to find it useful. Students gained wider perspectives on nursing, better understanding of social media, ‘being student nurses’, and various topics like health promotion. These first year students mostly followed online nursing communities but also patient organisations.
Conclusion: Nursing schools should consider introducing Twitter to first year nursing students, assessed within the broader context of Digital Professionalism. This lesson from nursing may be applicable for other disciplines.