Online Learning of Clinical Skills: The Untold Stories Behind the Camera

Abstract

The Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) had spurred the adoption of distance learning at all education levels. The closure of educational activities due to the pandemic resulted in an abrupt shift from traditional learning to a setup that exclusively involves digital teaching and learning. Likewise, the acquisition of clinical skills among student nurses had changed from the usual clinical skills laboratory setting to the use of online platforms like facebook messenger, google classroom, zoom meetings, and others. It has been known that over the years, clinical skills were acquired within a clinical skills laboratory where student nurses gain a hands-on experience with regards to the skills that they need to master. Furthermore, the clinical skills laboratory is where the student nurses perform their skills initially before applying them to real patients. Within this context, our study described Benguet State University (BSU) level two and level three student nurses’ perceptions regarding their experiences in acquiring clinical skills through online learning. Our study utilized the phenomenological approach specifically the descriptive phenomenology of Husserl to explore and describe the lived experiences of the participants. The experiences of the participants were obtained using a semi-structured interview which transpired online and face-to-face depending on the agreement between the researchers and the participants. Overall, 10 student nurses were selected using a maximum variation sampling technique and the data gathered were analyzed through thematic analysis using the Colaizzi’s 7-step method.