Elsevier

Nurse Education in Practice

Volume 12, Issue 5, September 2012, Pages 279-283
Nurse Education in Practice

Using online roleplay in undergraduate midwifery education: A case-study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2012.06.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Online roleplay i.e. role play which occurs using an online asynchronous discussion board, can be effectively utilised to teach a variety of skills to midwifery students. This paper will discuss the design and implementation of an online roleplay for a small (n = 19) class of final year undergraduate Midwifery students. It briefly describes the design of the online roleplay and outlines the expected learning outcomes of the activity. It then outlines evaluative survey results for student evaluation of the online role play. Results focus on student opinion of communication and collaboration skills developed through participation in the roleplay. Students considered that the online roleplay provided them with a means to allow communication skills to be developed and practiced. They also believed that the roleplay enable them to practice collaboration in an authentic real world setting. Finally implications for use of this method of teaching in nurse/midwife education are discussed.

Section snippets

Background

Upon graduation midwives are expected to be skilled communicators, ready and able to collaborate with a range of other health professionals in order to deliver quality health care (e.g. Australian Nursing and Midwifery Council (ANMC) 2006; Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) 2004). These skills include the ability to successfully negotiate with others, advocate for others (even if they hold an opinion which differs from their own), and to be able to clearly and succinctly argue a point of view

Method of evaluative data collection and findings

At the end of the final tutorial students were administered a paper-based survey. Twelve students took the time to complete the survey, a 63% response rate. The student survey was based on and adapted from the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) framework (Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), 2009). In particular the questions concerning skill development, active and collaborative learning and enriching educational experience are reported here as these bear a close

Skill development

There were four questions that provided students with the opportunity to respond as to how well they thought undertaking the roleplay enabled them to meet the learning objectives of the activity (as outlined above). Students responded with strong agreement to, possessing a better understanding (Questions (Q) 1&2 Table 3) concerning immunization. They indicated less strong agreement to the practice and knowledge application questions (Q. 3&4 Table 3). Only two students provided further comment

Active and collaborative learning

Questions regarding active and collaborative learning were aimed at determining the student's view on how well undertaking the roleplay facilitated collaboration and communication with each other. As Table 3 shows students were in strong broad agreement that the roleplay required them to use effective communication skills and assisted them to further develop their communication style (n = 11). They gave less positive responses to finding communication with other students easy (n = 8) and

Overall comment

Only two students made comments to the “other comments” question about their overall impressions of the value of the roleplay. These were:

Loved doing it!! and

Enjoyable spin on an interesting assignment, I think it worked quite well overall and we had no real issues at any point of the assignment.

Discussion

Fostering the development of communication skills for any health professional student is important, but can be difficult as currently there is no systematic approach to teaching such skills. For example, Aspergen conducted an extensive literature review of teaching and learning communication skills in medical education when 180 papers on the subject were reviewed and found that there are 10 commonly used measures of evaluating the effectiveness of communication skills learned (summarised in

Conclusions

Even though the number of students who responded to this survey was small their response was emphatic. They agreed that the online roleplay provided them with the opportunity to utilise effective communication and fostered development of negotiation and collaboration skills. It may therefore be concluded that students believe online roleplay provides a means to allow communication skills to be developed and practised.

Knowledge acquisition tied into the issues around infant immunization is also

Conflict of interest

None declared.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr Colleen Smith for her ongoing interest and support of the use of online roleplay in the School of Nursing and Midwifery UniSA. This midwifery roleplay arose out of a larger project which was funded by an UniSA Division of Health Sciences Teaching and Learning grant. We would also like to thank Ann Davenport (private consultant) and Dale Wache (UniSA) for their willingness to pass on their extensive knowledge of online roleplay design. Alison Hall and Caroline Jasper

References (21)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (8)

  • Online learning and teaching approaches used in midwifery programs: A scoping review

    2021, Nurse Education Today
    Citation Excerpt :

    Three studies in this review were written by the same authors. In the first publication by this research team Warland and Smith (2012), Warland et al. (2012) reported on the design and implementation of an e-role play for a class of 414 undergraduate midwifery students. Significant challenges for students and staff were identified.

  • Communication: Preparing undergraduate radiation therapy students for initial clinical patient interactions

    2019, Radiography
    Citation Excerpt :

    Communication skills training for students and health professionals can be taught via a number of methods; instruction, modelling, role-play, feedback and discussion.4 Of these, role-play exercises have proven to be useful in teaching communication and collaboration skills and reflective thinking to midwifery, nursing and medical students.2,8,9 Role-play can include using students or actors playing the role of patients and has been in use in medical training for over 40 years.6,7

  • Attitudes towards communication skills among nursing students and its association with sense of coherence

    2018, Kontakt
    Citation Excerpt :

    Thus, it is important to incorporate training of effective communication within the health-care team into the educational courses for Nursing and Midwifery students. Active listening, communicating in the decision making process, setting shared goals and sharing responsibilities, the ability to successfully negotiate with others, are all examples of interpersonal skills which need to be included into training programs in order to promote future effective team communication and a healthy professional environment [5,22]. Foronda et al. [23] suggest that it would be beneficial to include a broader scope into communication training programs, such as issues of patient safety, valuing diversity, team science, and cultural humility; as it seems that there are significant differences in communication styles of nurses and physicians.

View all citing articles on Scopus
1

Fax: +61 8 830 22168.

View full text