- Email: [email protected]
Can YouTube enhance student nurse learning?
Nurse Education Today 31 (2011) 311–313
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Nurse Education Today j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / n e d t
Can YouTube enhance student nurse learning? Andrew Clifton ⁎, Claire Mann Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Nottingham, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Accepted 1 October 2010 Keywords: Deep learning YouTube Digital nativity Nurse education
a b s t r a c t The delivery of nurse education has changed radically in the past two decades. Increasingly, nurse educators are using new technology in the classroom to enhance their teaching and learning. One recent technological development to emerge is the user-generated content website YouTube. Originally YouTube was used as a repository for sharing home-made videos, more recently online content is being generated by political parties, businesses and educationalists. We recently delivered a module to undergraduate student nurses in which the teaching and learning were highly populated with YouTube resources. We found that the use of YouTube videos increased student engagement, critical awareness and facilitated deep learning. Furthermore, these videos could be accessed at any time of the day and from a place to suit the student. We acknowledge that there are some constraints to using YouTube for teaching and learning particularly around the issue of unregulated content which is often misleading, inaccurate or biased. However, we strongly urge nurse educators to consider using YouTube for teaching and learning, in and outside the classroom, to a generation of students who are native of a rapidly changing digital world. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction There is no doubt that we are living in times of fast paced technological change which is altering the nature of social practice. The traditional model of higher education (HE) is shifting with students becoming powerful consumers of education and demanding up-to-date interesting and interactive models of teaching and support. Yet, it could be argued that university teaching remains driven by historical pedagogic models with the traditional passive lecture at the forefront of teaching delivery. 21st century nurse educators have an array of technological tools at their disposal to engage and stimulate student nurse learning. Virtual reality, patient simulation, podcasts, blogs, wikis, iTunes U (allows HE institutions to make audio and visual content available for download), computer assisted learning and user-generated content are some of the more popular innovations used to stimulate and engage the contemporary student. There is an emerging literature discussing how student nurses are being exposed to some of these technological developments in the classroom (McConville and Lane, 2006; Kelly et al., 2009; Baxter et al., 2009; Gerdprasert et al., 2010). What is less clear is the extent to which these technologies produce better outcomes for student nurses. Hall (2010) acknowledges that there are benefits to technological approaches in teaching and learning, but rejects the idea
⁎ Corresponding author. University of Nottingham, Room B19, Sir Colin Campbell Building, Innovation Park, Triumph Road, Nottingham, NG7 2TU, UK. Tel.: + 44 115 82 32473; fax: + 44 115 82 31392. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Clifton). 0260-6917/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.nedt.2010.10.004
that technology is a “panacea” for the netgen (net generation). Skiba (2007, p.100), however, strongly argues that these emerging technologies “will transform the way nursing education is offered” in the future.
YouTube One recent development in the past five years and has been described as a “social phenomenon” is the user-generated content social networking site YouTube. Launched in June 2005 YouTube is a repository for user-generated content including personal video clips, TV clips and music videos uploaded to the internet by individual members of the public. In more recent year's television broadcasters, political parties, universities, businesses, charities, hospitals, and nongovernmental organizations have established YouTube channels to deliver their own unique message or ideas to a wider audience. This phenomenon is linked to the incredible rate of digital growth which is reflected in several ways in changes in the social world. The latest generation of students is native of a digital world surrounded by ubiquitous access to a worldwide online environment through a range of devices. Today's students are experienced in digital interaction from an increasingly early age. They have different habits to students who have gone before in so far as they demand the wide range of resources to which they are accustomed in their social lives but suffer a lower attention span due to the range of activities constantly offered to them. Therefore as nurse educators we must find new ways of meeting the needs of the netgen. One solution to this problem is to use YouTube for teaching and learning.
312
A. Clifton, C. Mann / Nurse Education Today 31 (2011) 311–313
Benefits of YouTube for teaching and learning The first benefit to using YouTube in teaching and learning is that it is a recognised tool from the digital environment of the netgen. YouTube is an established social software and has millions of users and is already being used as both an informal and formal learning tool by many. As its benefits are becoming more established universities are adding their own channel to provide wider access to their institutions' learning materials. A benefit to using YouTube as a learning resource is ubiquity, the fact that it can be accessed anywhere at any time. It is like having a digital TV running several thousand ondemand channels at once which are never switched off. This means students can engage with their learning at a time and place to suit them. This meets the specific needs of student nurses who spend significant proportions of their learning lives off-campus, at placements. Many HE students have online access at home and there is a dramatic increase in availability of wireless access and smart devices which means that learning really is an ever-present activity and likely to increase in this way. Clearly YouTube has the benefit of reaching out to our students, but we need to be clear about the ways that this resource can benefit learning specifically. How does YouTube support learning? There is significant debate in the educational research literature about the student experiences of higher education. Biggs (1979) considered that students take a range of learning approaches which are related to their academic success and created a taxonomy describing what happens at each stage of learning. Surface learning is related to rote learning new facts for their own sake, whereas deeper learning is related to the ability to apply new facts in contexts. It is therefore now universally agreed that the aim of universities is to support deep learning approaches in order that any new knowledge may be usefully applied in the workplace post-qualifying. Use of YouTube in the classroom can facilitate deep learning. The Biggs (1979) solo taxonomy describes the activities of deeper learning as relating, comparing and analyzing ideas in order to generalize, hypothesize and theorize. YouTube videos can be used to support these aims. So how can using YouTube, particularly in large group teaching scenarios, aid deep learning for student nurses? Using YouTube as a tool in the classroom can lead to increased engagement in several key ways. Firstly by using alternative delivery methods within large group teaching, the break in delivery methods along simply keeps students' attention focused. This is especially pertinent in the digital era with the reducing attention span of the netgen. Secondly, as well as simply keeping students focused in the classroom, using visual methods of delivery is an established method of keeping material ‘memorable’. It is often easier to recall something which has been seen, than heard. The bite sized chunks of videos offered within the YouTube environment means several short videos from differing sources can easily be accessed within one session. Thirdly, the range of material is a benefit and the content of YouTube is unique in its vast breadth and depth. Therefore teachers can access material which is more engaging than traditional educational material. Humour, music, homemade artifacts can all be recalled as easily as government broadcasts, public health materials and traditional nursing videos. Engaging the netgen is about more than keeping their attention whilst they sit in front of you for a one hour lecture; student nurses want to learn at a time and place to suit them and the YouTube culture encourages this form of distance learning. We as nurse educators are not maximizing our students' learning if we do not provide the opportunity for them to learn outside our classroom. By recognizing the advantage of YouTube as a widely available tool, we can support our students by directing them to appropriate resources which are available for them to use whenever and however it suits them. Therefore our students no
Fig. 1. Tag cloud of student nurse responses to: did the YouTube style of teaching help you learn and if so how and why?
longer need to trudge to the library and join a waiting list to access a suitable supporting material. In a recent module we delivered to student nurses which was heavily populated with YouTube resources we asked students ‘Did this style of teaching help you learn and if so how and why?’ Their responses emphasized these multiple ways of increasing engagement and are represented visually in the tag cloud above (Fig. 1). Engaging the students from a passive to an interactive position is the first step to deeper learning. To further stimulate deep learning students need to be encouraged to relate, compare and analyse ideas. YouTube offers a medium to provide multiple viewpoints to provoke comparison within the lecture environment. YouTube opens the door to find alternative representations of anything you might want to say. For example in a search related to smoking videos on YouTube you will find clear messages from those both for and against but also a infinitely wide range of scenarios in which messages about smoking are delivered which can reinforce or dismay any argument (Freeman and Chapman, 2007). There is no point playing a YouTube video in class or expecting students to watch one at home and deep learning to simply occur. The depth of learning will depend on the extent to which the student can analyse the video data given and make sense of it in relation to the context of their learning. Therefore the role of the lecturer is to stimulate discussion which meets this aim. Godwin (2007) reports that group discussions stimulated by using YouTube in the classroom environment can lead to deep learning both about the subject at hand as well as about critical evaluation in information literacy. Kellner and Kim (2009) confirm that UTers (YouTube users) who responded to a video either through text comments or video responses showed higher motivation in the discussion. They describe this as the: ‘process of video postings as self education, UTers thus practice the pedagogy of learning-by-doing as “performative pedagogy” that they effectively engage in their everyday lives as a fundamental process of meaning-making’ (Kellner and Kim, 2009, p. 15). Therefore through active critical engagement with video resources learners are developing both knowledge and critical thinking skills. It is imperative to this aim that appropriate videos are used which offer comparisons or relationships between ideas being presented. Good techniques to use are presenting alternative sides of arguments and allowing discussions about the appropriateness of choices. Through stimulated discussions students can recognise and evaluate alternative viewpoints and therefore the representation of multiple viewpoints provokes student critical thinking approaches. For example Keelan et al. (2007, p. 2482) analyse and categorize a wide range of videos relating to immunisation and draw the conclusion that there exists ‘a presence of a community of YouTube users critical of
A. Clifton, C. Mann / Nurse Education Today 31 (2011) 311–313
immunisation’. There is therefore the need for users of YouTube to be critical evaluators of their learning materials which is a potential constraint of this tool. Constraints of YouTube for teaching and learning We acknowledge there are some constraints to using YouTube for teaching and learning. The main risk here is that of authorship — YouTube is a resource of user-generated content with no quality regulation. Cha et al. (2007) report on the prevalence of content duplication and illegal uploads. There are several studies which perform a content analysis on specific fields relevant to nursing or health education on YouTube from tobacco to immunisation and tanning salons. As Hossler and Conroy (2008) reports in their paper on tanning use there is a real risk attached to user-generated content in case it is a source of medical misinformation. There is also the risk that searching for resources can result in wide ranging findings in both type and content. There is the potential for this risk to arise with students who may be searching for learning information and find it biased, or more importantly miss that it is biased. Freeman and Chapman (2007) point to the risk of YouTube being used as a mode of subversive advertising and report on a wide range of underhand tactics used by tobacco companies to sponsor their products. There is clearly a risk to the potential quality of learning dependent on the resources used. Clearly there is a need to be internet and information literate in order to benefit from YouTube as a teaching and learning resource. The need to develop learning skills which will last beyond a defined period of study is a feature of critical pedagogy. It is clear that students will need to develop a critical approach to using web 2.0 technologies as resources for teaching and learning as well as for life. We have explored the needs of digital natives; however meeting those needs may be difficult for nurse educators who are more digitally immigrant than their students. There are also the obvious risks associated with using any technology in the classroom. Suffice to say that the increases in wireless and bandwidth technologies as well as staff development opportunities ensure there are minimal obstacles to delivering internet based materials in the classroom. Conclusion YouTube is a tool which can be used for teaching and learning and can increase engagement in a lecture hall of nursing students. This increased engagement can lead to deeper learning through represen-
313
tation of multiple viewpoints and associated stimulated discussion and development of critical thinking. The obvious risk and need is to ensure that students can critically evaluate the resources they encounter. Skiba (2007, p. 100) agrees: ‘There is a lot of controversy surrounding trash on YouTube, but this is a social phenomenon that cannot be ignored by educators.’ Therefore if we as teachers wish to engage our students in deep and authentic learning using YouTube represents one significant opportunity. Used to pedagogic advantage it should increase engagement and offer useful conceptual links between theory and practice. We therefore encourage other nurse educators to use YouTube for teaching and learning and meet the needs of our students. In the words of Prensky (2001, p.1) ‘Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.’
References Baxter, P., Akhtar-Danesh, N., Valaitis, R., Stanyon, W., Sproul, S., 2009. Simulated experiences: nursing students share their experiences. Nurse Education Today 29 (8), 859–866. Biggs, J.B., 1979. Individual differences in study processes and the quality of learning outcomes. Higher Education 8, 381–394. Cha, M., Kwak, H., Rodriguez, P., Ahn, Y., Moon, S., 2007. I Tube, You Tube, everybody Tubes: analyzing the world's largest user generated content video system, Presented at IMC'07, October 24–26, 2007, San Diego, California, USA. Freeman, B., Chapman, S., 2007. Is “YouTube” telling or selling you something? Tobacco content on the YouTube video-sharing website. Tobacco Control 16, 207–210. Gerdprasert, S., Pruksacheva, T., Panijpan, B., Ruenwongsa, P., 2010. Development of a web-based learning medium of labour for nursing students. Nurse Education Today 30 (5), 464–469. Godwin, P., 2007. The Web 2.0 Challenge to Information Literacy, Presented at Inforum 2007 Prague, accessed online at http://inforum.sk/pdf/2007/godwin-peter.pdf. Hall, W.A., 2010. Whither nursing education? Possibilities, panaceas, and problems. Nurse Education Today 29 (3), 268–275. Hossler, E.W., Conroy, M.P., 2008. YouTube as a source of information on tanning bed use. Arch Dermatol 144 (10), 1395–1396. Keelan, J., Pavri-Garcia, V., Tomlinson, G., Wilson, K., 2007. YouTube as a source of information on immunization: a content analysis. Journal American Medical Association 298 (21), 2482–2484. Kellner, D., Kim, G., 2009. YouTube, Critical Pedagogy and Media Activism: An Articulation. Accessed online at http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/2009_essays.html. Kelly, M., Lyng, C., McGrath, M., Cannon, G., 2009. A multi-method study to determine the effectiveness of, and student attitudes to, online instructional videos for teaching clinical nursing skills. Nurse Education Today 29 (3), 292–300. McConville, S.A., Lane, A.M., 2006. Using on-line video clips to enhance self-efficacy towards dealing with difficult situations among nursing students. Nurse Education Today 26 (3), 200–208. Prensky, M., 2001. Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon 9 (5), 1–6. Skiba, D.J., 2007. Nursing education 2.0: YouTube. Nursing Education Perspectives 28 (2), 100–102.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Nurse Education Today j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / n e d t
Can YouTube enhance student nurse learning? Andrew Clifton ⁎, Claire Mann Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Nottingham, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Accepted 1 October 2010 Keywords: Deep learning YouTube Digital nativity Nurse education
a b s t r a c t The delivery of nurse education has changed radically in the past two decades. Increasingly, nurse educators are using new technology in the classroom to enhance their teaching and learning. One recent technological development to emerge is the user-generated content website YouTube. Originally YouTube was used as a repository for sharing home-made videos, more recently online content is being generated by political parties, businesses and educationalists. We recently delivered a module to undergraduate student nurses in which the teaching and learning were highly populated with YouTube resources. We found that the use of YouTube videos increased student engagement, critical awareness and facilitated deep learning. Furthermore, these videos could be accessed at any time of the day and from a place to suit the student. We acknowledge that there are some constraints to using YouTube for teaching and learning particularly around the issue of unregulated content which is often misleading, inaccurate or biased. However, we strongly urge nurse educators to consider using YouTube for teaching and learning, in and outside the classroom, to a generation of students who are native of a rapidly changing digital world. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction There is no doubt that we are living in times of fast paced technological change which is altering the nature of social practice. The traditional model of higher education (HE) is shifting with students becoming powerful consumers of education and demanding up-to-date interesting and interactive models of teaching and support. Yet, it could be argued that university teaching remains driven by historical pedagogic models with the traditional passive lecture at the forefront of teaching delivery. 21st century nurse educators have an array of technological tools at their disposal to engage and stimulate student nurse learning. Virtual reality, patient simulation, podcasts, blogs, wikis, iTunes U (allows HE institutions to make audio and visual content available for download), computer assisted learning and user-generated content are some of the more popular innovations used to stimulate and engage the contemporary student. There is an emerging literature discussing how student nurses are being exposed to some of these technological developments in the classroom (McConville and Lane, 2006; Kelly et al., 2009; Baxter et al., 2009; Gerdprasert et al., 2010). What is less clear is the extent to which these technologies produce better outcomes for student nurses. Hall (2010) acknowledges that there are benefits to technological approaches in teaching and learning, but rejects the idea
⁎ Corresponding author. University of Nottingham, Room B19, Sir Colin Campbell Building, Innovation Park, Triumph Road, Nottingham, NG7 2TU, UK. Tel.: + 44 115 82 32473; fax: + 44 115 82 31392. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Clifton). 0260-6917/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.nedt.2010.10.004
that technology is a “panacea” for the netgen (net generation). Skiba (2007, p.100), however, strongly argues that these emerging technologies “will transform the way nursing education is offered” in the future.
YouTube One recent development in the past five years and has been described as a “social phenomenon” is the user-generated content social networking site YouTube. Launched in June 2005 YouTube is a repository for user-generated content including personal video clips, TV clips and music videos uploaded to the internet by individual members of the public. In more recent year's television broadcasters, political parties, universities, businesses, charities, hospitals, and nongovernmental organizations have established YouTube channels to deliver their own unique message or ideas to a wider audience. This phenomenon is linked to the incredible rate of digital growth which is reflected in several ways in changes in the social world. The latest generation of students is native of a digital world surrounded by ubiquitous access to a worldwide online environment through a range of devices. Today's students are experienced in digital interaction from an increasingly early age. They have different habits to students who have gone before in so far as they demand the wide range of resources to which they are accustomed in their social lives but suffer a lower attention span due to the range of activities constantly offered to them. Therefore as nurse educators we must find new ways of meeting the needs of the netgen. One solution to this problem is to use YouTube for teaching and learning.
312
A. Clifton, C. Mann / Nurse Education Today 31 (2011) 311–313
Benefits of YouTube for teaching and learning The first benefit to using YouTube in teaching and learning is that it is a recognised tool from the digital environment of the netgen. YouTube is an established social software and has millions of users and is already being used as both an informal and formal learning tool by many. As its benefits are becoming more established universities are adding their own channel to provide wider access to their institutions' learning materials. A benefit to using YouTube as a learning resource is ubiquity, the fact that it can be accessed anywhere at any time. It is like having a digital TV running several thousand ondemand channels at once which are never switched off. This means students can engage with their learning at a time and place to suit them. This meets the specific needs of student nurses who spend significant proportions of their learning lives off-campus, at placements. Many HE students have online access at home and there is a dramatic increase in availability of wireless access and smart devices which means that learning really is an ever-present activity and likely to increase in this way. Clearly YouTube has the benefit of reaching out to our students, but we need to be clear about the ways that this resource can benefit learning specifically. How does YouTube support learning? There is significant debate in the educational research literature about the student experiences of higher education. Biggs (1979) considered that students take a range of learning approaches which are related to their academic success and created a taxonomy describing what happens at each stage of learning. Surface learning is related to rote learning new facts for their own sake, whereas deeper learning is related to the ability to apply new facts in contexts. It is therefore now universally agreed that the aim of universities is to support deep learning approaches in order that any new knowledge may be usefully applied in the workplace post-qualifying. Use of YouTube in the classroom can facilitate deep learning. The Biggs (1979) solo taxonomy describes the activities of deeper learning as relating, comparing and analyzing ideas in order to generalize, hypothesize and theorize. YouTube videos can be used to support these aims. So how can using YouTube, particularly in large group teaching scenarios, aid deep learning for student nurses? Using YouTube as a tool in the classroom can lead to increased engagement in several key ways. Firstly by using alternative delivery methods within large group teaching, the break in delivery methods along simply keeps students' attention focused. This is especially pertinent in the digital era with the reducing attention span of the netgen. Secondly, as well as simply keeping students focused in the classroom, using visual methods of delivery is an established method of keeping material ‘memorable’. It is often easier to recall something which has been seen, than heard. The bite sized chunks of videos offered within the YouTube environment means several short videos from differing sources can easily be accessed within one session. Thirdly, the range of material is a benefit and the content of YouTube is unique in its vast breadth and depth. Therefore teachers can access material which is more engaging than traditional educational material. Humour, music, homemade artifacts can all be recalled as easily as government broadcasts, public health materials and traditional nursing videos. Engaging the netgen is about more than keeping their attention whilst they sit in front of you for a one hour lecture; student nurses want to learn at a time and place to suit them and the YouTube culture encourages this form of distance learning. We as nurse educators are not maximizing our students' learning if we do not provide the opportunity for them to learn outside our classroom. By recognizing the advantage of YouTube as a widely available tool, we can support our students by directing them to appropriate resources which are available for them to use whenever and however it suits them. Therefore our students no
Fig. 1. Tag cloud of student nurse responses to: did the YouTube style of teaching help you learn and if so how and why?
longer need to trudge to the library and join a waiting list to access a suitable supporting material. In a recent module we delivered to student nurses which was heavily populated with YouTube resources we asked students ‘Did this style of teaching help you learn and if so how and why?’ Their responses emphasized these multiple ways of increasing engagement and are represented visually in the tag cloud above (Fig. 1). Engaging the students from a passive to an interactive position is the first step to deeper learning. To further stimulate deep learning students need to be encouraged to relate, compare and analyse ideas. YouTube offers a medium to provide multiple viewpoints to provoke comparison within the lecture environment. YouTube opens the door to find alternative representations of anything you might want to say. For example in a search related to smoking videos on YouTube you will find clear messages from those both for and against but also a infinitely wide range of scenarios in which messages about smoking are delivered which can reinforce or dismay any argument (Freeman and Chapman, 2007). There is no point playing a YouTube video in class or expecting students to watch one at home and deep learning to simply occur. The depth of learning will depend on the extent to which the student can analyse the video data given and make sense of it in relation to the context of their learning. Therefore the role of the lecturer is to stimulate discussion which meets this aim. Godwin (2007) reports that group discussions stimulated by using YouTube in the classroom environment can lead to deep learning both about the subject at hand as well as about critical evaluation in information literacy. Kellner and Kim (2009) confirm that UTers (YouTube users) who responded to a video either through text comments or video responses showed higher motivation in the discussion. They describe this as the: ‘process of video postings as self education, UTers thus practice the pedagogy of learning-by-doing as “performative pedagogy” that they effectively engage in their everyday lives as a fundamental process of meaning-making’ (Kellner and Kim, 2009, p. 15). Therefore through active critical engagement with video resources learners are developing both knowledge and critical thinking skills. It is imperative to this aim that appropriate videos are used which offer comparisons or relationships between ideas being presented. Good techniques to use are presenting alternative sides of arguments and allowing discussions about the appropriateness of choices. Through stimulated discussions students can recognise and evaluate alternative viewpoints and therefore the representation of multiple viewpoints provokes student critical thinking approaches. For example Keelan et al. (2007, p. 2482) analyse and categorize a wide range of videos relating to immunisation and draw the conclusion that there exists ‘a presence of a community of YouTube users critical of
A. Clifton, C. Mann / Nurse Education Today 31 (2011) 311–313
immunisation’. There is therefore the need for users of YouTube to be critical evaluators of their learning materials which is a potential constraint of this tool. Constraints of YouTube for teaching and learning We acknowledge there are some constraints to using YouTube for teaching and learning. The main risk here is that of authorship — YouTube is a resource of user-generated content with no quality regulation. Cha et al. (2007) report on the prevalence of content duplication and illegal uploads. There are several studies which perform a content analysis on specific fields relevant to nursing or health education on YouTube from tobacco to immunisation and tanning salons. As Hossler and Conroy (2008) reports in their paper on tanning use there is a real risk attached to user-generated content in case it is a source of medical misinformation. There is also the risk that searching for resources can result in wide ranging findings in both type and content. There is the potential for this risk to arise with students who may be searching for learning information and find it biased, or more importantly miss that it is biased. Freeman and Chapman (2007) point to the risk of YouTube being used as a mode of subversive advertising and report on a wide range of underhand tactics used by tobacco companies to sponsor their products. There is clearly a risk to the potential quality of learning dependent on the resources used. Clearly there is a need to be internet and information literate in order to benefit from YouTube as a teaching and learning resource. The need to develop learning skills which will last beyond a defined period of study is a feature of critical pedagogy. It is clear that students will need to develop a critical approach to using web 2.0 technologies as resources for teaching and learning as well as for life. We have explored the needs of digital natives; however meeting those needs may be difficult for nurse educators who are more digitally immigrant than their students. There are also the obvious risks associated with using any technology in the classroom. Suffice to say that the increases in wireless and bandwidth technologies as well as staff development opportunities ensure there are minimal obstacles to delivering internet based materials in the classroom. Conclusion YouTube is a tool which can be used for teaching and learning and can increase engagement in a lecture hall of nursing students. This increased engagement can lead to deeper learning through represen-
313
tation of multiple viewpoints and associated stimulated discussion and development of critical thinking. The obvious risk and need is to ensure that students can critically evaluate the resources they encounter. Skiba (2007, p. 100) agrees: ‘There is a lot of controversy surrounding trash on YouTube, but this is a social phenomenon that cannot be ignored by educators.’ Therefore if we as teachers wish to engage our students in deep and authentic learning using YouTube represents one significant opportunity. Used to pedagogic advantage it should increase engagement and offer useful conceptual links between theory and practice. We therefore encourage other nurse educators to use YouTube for teaching and learning and meet the needs of our students. In the words of Prensky (2001, p.1) ‘Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.’
References Baxter, P., Akhtar-Danesh, N., Valaitis, R., Stanyon, W., Sproul, S., 2009. Simulated experiences: nursing students share their experiences. Nurse Education Today 29 (8), 859–866. Biggs, J.B., 1979. Individual differences in study processes and the quality of learning outcomes. Higher Education 8, 381–394. Cha, M., Kwak, H., Rodriguez, P., Ahn, Y., Moon, S., 2007. I Tube, You Tube, everybody Tubes: analyzing the world's largest user generated content video system, Presented at IMC'07, October 24–26, 2007, San Diego, California, USA. Freeman, B., Chapman, S., 2007. Is “YouTube” telling or selling you something? Tobacco content on the YouTube video-sharing website. Tobacco Control 16, 207–210. Gerdprasert, S., Pruksacheva, T., Panijpan, B., Ruenwongsa, P., 2010. Development of a web-based learning medium of labour for nursing students. Nurse Education Today 30 (5), 464–469. Godwin, P., 2007. The Web 2.0 Challenge to Information Literacy, Presented at Inforum 2007 Prague, accessed online at http://inforum.sk/pdf/2007/godwin-peter.pdf. Hall, W.A., 2010. Whither nursing education? Possibilities, panaceas, and problems. Nurse Education Today 29 (3), 268–275. Hossler, E.W., Conroy, M.P., 2008. YouTube as a source of information on tanning bed use. Arch Dermatol 144 (10), 1395–1396. Keelan, J., Pavri-Garcia, V., Tomlinson, G., Wilson, K., 2007. YouTube as a source of information on immunization: a content analysis. Journal American Medical Association 298 (21), 2482–2484. Kellner, D., Kim, G., 2009. YouTube, Critical Pedagogy and Media Activism: An Articulation. Accessed online at http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/2009_essays.html. Kelly, M., Lyng, C., McGrath, M., Cannon, G., 2009. A multi-method study to determine the effectiveness of, and student attitudes to, online instructional videos for teaching clinical nursing skills. Nurse Education Today 29 (3), 292–300. McConville, S.A., Lane, A.M., 2006. Using on-line video clips to enhance self-efficacy towards dealing with difficult situations among nursing students. Nurse Education Today 26 (3), 200–208. Prensky, M., 2001. Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon 9 (5), 1–6. Skiba, D.J., 2007. Nursing education 2.0: YouTube. Nursing Education Perspectives 28 (2), 100–102.