USE OF WORD CLOUDS TO DEVELOP REFLECTION WITH ONLINE UNDERGRADUATE NURSING STUDENTS
Rationale/Background: Reflection is an important aspect for the development of critical thinking in undergraduate nursing students. Reflection allows students to integrate learning with their own personal context to develop knowledge at deeper levels. Undergraduate nursing students who attend courses within programs through online, asynchronous programs often express difficulty sharing themes, concepts, or ideas within courses and with their peers. While student interaction among discussion boards is an important aspect of learning for the online student, the use of discussion questions and peer responses can become scripted and lack creativity when utilized weekly. The use of word clouds helps the student develop and analyze themes from their course readings and provides the ability to communicate information with their peers in a creative manner. The use of word clouds allows students to develop themes and concepts beyond the traditional methods and introduces a visual aspect to an online learning environment.
Approach: RN-BSN students enrolled in an asynchronous, online community health course read chapters from their community health textbook regarding evidence-based practice within community health settings. Each student had the choice to create a traditional discussion and peer response or create a word cloud and word cloud caption discussion. Each student who participated in the word cloud discussion created a synthesis of the major themes and concepts using word clouds. Students created their word clouds using an online tutorial provided by the course instructor and wrote short captions for their individual word clouds. Each student posted their word cloud and caption to the online discussion board for the learning module. Students provided feedback to each other through discussion board peer responses. At the conclusion of the module, participating students completed a survey to analyze the learning and reflection developed during the project. Students also created reflections regarding their analysis of the class developed themes using word clouds.
Outcomes: The projected outcome of the ongoing project is that undergraduate students in an online, asynchronous program will reflect on the major themes and concepts of evidence-based practice within community health settings through their own and their peer’s word clouds and captions. These reflections will allow students to build a synthesis of these concepts and construct a deeper knowledge of the community health themes.
Conclusions: It is anticipated that the conclusion and recommendation will be for the inclusion of a word cloud and word cloud caption discussion assignment in an asynchronous, online undergraduate nursing program to develop creative methods of building reflection and developing knowledge for the undergraduate RN-BSN student.