Technology and teaching: Avoiding the pitfalls, increasing student engagement, and improving outcomes

In an ever-changing educational landscape challenged by rapidly evolving technological advances, nursing educators are challenged to incorporate their best teaching approaches in the classroom and beyond to ensure student engagement and best learning outcomes. Innovation is then balanced with student needs and learning styles. As we respond to the demands of an ever changing health care environment and a new generation of nursing students with a variety of learning styles, we focused our efforts to help these students incorporate challenging material and use their critical thinking skills. We also focused on developing their roles as nurse practitioners who utilize the latest evidence based practice. At the same time, we are trying daily to avoid the educational pitfalls of the past, and to transform curriculum to meet the needs of the students and the pediatric population they will serve. Adapting new technologies should be carefully weighed against the traditional methods of lecturing. Increasingly, hybrid courses, a combination of teaching in the digital environment (online) and face-to-face interaction between students and faculty, are proving to be very effective, and the student feedback regarding this teaching method is overwhelmingly positive. In this article, we share some of our best practices to teaching in this hybrid, digital environment.