Nurse education today

With the recent challenges due to the Coronavirus 2019 outbreak, distance learning has been largely introduced in healthcare sciences curricula, and universities have been called upon to share learning opportunities with each other to ensure continuity of education and delivery of new graduates to the health system. However, decisions about its introduction should be supported by up-to-date evidence capable of providing an overview of available knowledge. To map the (a) state of research on massive open online courses in undergraduate and postgraduate health sciences education, (b) evaluation methods and tools used to measure learning outcomes, and (c) factors increasing their effectiveness as documented to date. A rapid review following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis guidelines. PubMed, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Cochrane, Scopus, PsycInfo and Medline (via Ovid) were searched. Primary studies reporting one or more massive open online course (1) devoted to undergraduate and/or postgraduate students in nursing and healthcare sciences (2), written in English (3) with abstract available (4) and published up to February 18th, 2020 were all included. After having assessed the need for a review and the topic itself (a), the literature search was performed (b), studies were screened and selected (c), data was extracted (d), and the findings were summarised (e). Thirty-six studies emerged with mainly an explorative/descriptive or case study design. The courses have been developed mainly by universities alone or in collaboration with institutions mainly in US, Sweden and the UK. Their delivery has been performed at multi-national levels, mainly in English, and with a number of participants ranging from 45 to >23,000. The duration spanned from two weeks to six months on clinical topics (e.g., emergency medicine) to methods (e.g., statistics). The target audience has been mainly mixed, including students, healthcare professionals, and lay citizens. E...

What knowledge is available on massive open online courses in nursing and academic healthcare sciences education? A rapid review