Nursing Students Enter Virtual Reality World
Students in the College of Nursing, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences have a new high-tech way to learn this year, with the addition of immersive virtual reality (VR) to their curriculum.
October 17, 2022 — Students in the College of Nursing, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences have a new high-tech way to learn this year, with the addition of immersive virtual reality (VR) to their curriculum.
The college opened two VR learning rooms with a total of 11 workstations at the Helen Glass Centre for Nursing in September.
Kimberly Workum, director of the Clinical Competence Assessment Centre and digital strategy at the College of Nursing, said VR learning has been a vision of the college for several years, but the COVID pandemic played a role fast-tracking the platform, as it gives a more immersive learning experience than other virtual learning tools.
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New virtual training lab for RPCC nursing students
As part of a larger initiative in spatial learning, RPCC expanded its VR Mobile Sim Lab to include a permanent, fixed VR Sim Lab at Reserve. With over 50 pre-built scenarios, instructors and students can get started in the VR platform immediately. And when students are done, the VR healthcare platform allows for instructors to capture data that otherwise is counterproductive, if not impossible, to assess student performance with necessary skills. From how long the student took to make decisions, to rewatching the student’s performance, and even automatically capturing skills gaps based on objectives the instructor prescribes, faculty can focus more on the teaching, learning, and reteaching necessary to help students reach their highest potential as healthcare professionals. However, the power of this VR healthcare platform goes beyond those features. In consultation with faculty, RPCC’s Department of Innovative Teaching & Learning is developing their own healthcare experiences in VR to represent situations healthcare professionals more accurately in south Louisiana will encounter.
