In the second presentation of today’s afternoon session, I attended Laura Orsetti’s talk on role-playing using Canvas conversations.
For the “Advanced Physical Assessment” course at Frontier Nursing University, Laura designed an activity in which students complete an Objective Standardized Clinical Evaluation (OSCE) using a Canvas conversation. Prior to this redesign, students had interviewed an actress over a phone and had to evaluate her based on that limited interaction.
With Canvas conversation, the same actress can be seen with the built in video conferencing tool. The student can also be seen, so they are forced to work on their professionalism and bed-side manner in a more robust way than they had to over the phone. The recording of the video can then be evaluated by the instructor and reviewed with the student.
Some hospitals have also implemented a video conferencing tool for consultations with nurse practitioners. This video conferencing assessment can thus also serve as skill development for students from Frontier when they move into the job market.
When we were evaluating Canvas at OU, one of the things that Keegan and I really liked was the intuitive integration of audio, video, and conferencing tools. Moving from a phone call to a video conference may seem like a small thing, but for the students in the nursing program at Frontier, the logistics have been streamlined and their evaluation enhanced with no real difficulty for anyone.
The role-playing utilized in this particular example also served as a nice demonstration of a situated, meaningful assessment. Rather than simply quizzing their students over OSCE, role-playing evaluates the students ability to perform in a real world situation. I think this type of role-playing is more common in professional degree programs, but I would love to see it replace the relatively uni-directional quiz-type assessments often used in Engineering courses or even the liberal arts.
