U of S College of Nursing uses high tech tools at northern schools
At the Northlands College nursing skills lab in Air Ronge, nursing students listen attentively to assistant professor Carol Bullin. The lessons they’ll learn today are no different than the ones their cohorts in Saskatoon will learn, but the delivery is a bit novel: Bullin is speaking to her class through the RP7i mobile robot.
The robot is one tool of many used in the distributed learning program at the University of Saskatchewan College of Nursing. Other tools include video and web conferencing, mobile devices, online learning environments, and good, old-fashioned face-to-face instruction.
“You choose the right tool for the situation,” says Heather Exner-Pirot, strategist for outreach and Indigenous engagement with the College of Nursing. “We don’t do everything with the robot all the time just because we have the robot. They use the robot when it’s the right tool.”
The distributed learning program has the potential to revolutionize both education and healthcare in rural Saskatchewan. The students who enter the program tend to be over 25, and have deep local connections. Moving to the city for four years to study is not usually an option. Distributed learning is an opportunity for them to go to school, and when they graduate, they’re more likely to stay in their communities.
“Everywhere in the world there are issues of rural recruitment, so for us this is a really good solution,” Exner -Pirot says. “For me, it’s about better quality of life in our rural and remote areas.”
The college prefers the term “distributed learning” over “remote” or “distance” education because the latter terms depend on your perspective. Who is distant -- the school or the student? For the students learning in a northern community, it’s the school that’s distant, not them.
In the first cohort to interact with the robot in 2012, a student satisfaction survey found that 94 per cent of students felt comfortable with the combination of the robot and an on-site registered nurse. When the idea of using the robot for education first arose, though, not everyone was quick to jump on board.
“Some people said this won’t work in the north, or this won’t work with Indigenous people; the technology is too different; it’s not culturally appropriate,” Exner-Pirot says.
But the students accepted the new technology quickly. Bullin was an early adopter, and in a video on the College of Nursing website, she relates one of her experiences using the robot: “By the second lab in, the students and the instructor were going to go for a coffee break, and they said, ‘Oh, Carol, can we get you anything? Can we pick you up a coffee?’ And I’m going, are you guys being funny or what? Then they caught themselves, and they said, ‘We really thought you were there.’”
Originally, the robot was designed for clinical settings, not educational ones. The RP7i and other mobile robots like it are used for Telehealth -- a means to quickly connect to specialized healthcare professionals when none are available on location. For example, Telehealth can allow patients to meet with specialists in their own community, without having to drive hours to the nearest major centre.
The U of S was the first school in the world to use the robot for teaching. They’ve also founded a northern nursing network with schools in Greenland, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Finland and northern Canada to share best practices in distributed nursing education.
The quality of the program is just as good as what they would receive in the city -- the students have to pass the same regulatory exams to qualify to work as a nurse -- and in some ways, the students in the distributed learning program are actually ahead of their citybased counterparts.
“If students are learning about robotics or mobile devices in the classroom, they’ll be more comfortable to use Telehealth when they graduate,” says Exner-Pirot.
She’s especially excited about the potential distributed learning has to bridge the rural-urban gap and give more remote areas a higher quality life.
“It’s a great impact for rural communities. The big trend has been urbanization, and technology has created more of a gap – things are happening more quickly in cities, and rural areas are getting left behind. So how can we use technology to create those opportunities for rural and remote communities? They can be the winners by increasing technology, not the losers.”