Clinical learning for pre-registration nursing students: a viva voce approach during COVID-19

Although it is not yet possible to fully realise the long-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on global nurse education, there have been substantial changes to the provision of education for nursing students due to the pandemic spanning high-, medium- and low-income countries (Agu et al, 2021). Currently, both for many nurse educators and students, the scholastic journey has become unrecognisable from the pedagogical approach that we have become accustomed to. Although this pandemic has been one of the greatest challenges for nursing in over a century of professional practice, for nurse educators it has sown the seeds of change and forced many new adaptations to be made to what have been firmly established educational practices (Swift et al, 2020; Haslam, 2021).

Before COVID-19, clinical skills within higher education institutions were commonly assessed using a mixture of high- and low-fidelity simulation and assessment, involving both nursing-specific and interdisciplinary approaches to learning. During the first wave of the global pandemic, there was a move to limit all face-to-face contact between students and educators, leading to primarily online learning (Dewart et al, 2020; Ramos-Morcillo et al, 2020). This involved extended periods of using only screen-based learning and assessment (Alsafi et al, 2020). An example involves the move to using video footage of physical assessment skills to facilitate the learning of both technical and critical reasoning skills. Similarly, in academic assessment, in many instances, traditional written and/or on-campus examinations have been replaced by remote, online, open-book alternatives (Alsafi et al, 2020). Other innovations reported in the literature include online video-based assessments that enable students to create and perform in medication advertising, which utilises skills akin to those of influencers and social media professionals (Stuckey and Wright, 2020).