Interactive Videoconference Supported Teaching in Undergraduate Nursing: A Case Study for ECG

This paper describes how interactive videoconference can benefit the Electrocardiography (ECG) skills of undergraduate nursing students. We have implemented a learning system that interactively transfers the visual and practical aspects of ECG from a nursing skills lab into a classroom where the theoretical part of the course is taught. The students and the instructor in the classroom observe the activities in the skill lab in real time, while communicating with the nurse in the lab via audio and video links. An experiment was performed with the participation of 13 male and 57 female (total 70) second year nursing students—36 of who were assigned to Videoconference group (experimental group-VCG) and the other 34 were assigned to Traditional Classroom groups (control group-TCG). In the experiment, ECG knowledge levels of participants were measured by repeated tests (pretest, posttest I and posttest II) and data were analyzed with repeated measures of variances and covariance, the results demonstrating that videoconferencing contributed significantly to the improvement of ECG skills of the participants. In addition, a questionnaire was given to students along with posttest II, and the result of which indicated overwhelming satisfaction with videoconference based lecture.