Design thinking is a cognitive process where the person thinks like a designer to try to understand the thoughts and perspectives of the consumers of the products the designer makes. This thinking process helps people develop a deep understanding and empathy of the people for whom they are designing the products. In the nursing field, design thinking benefits nursing students' abilities in regard to interdisciplinary collaboration and technology adoption.
Interdisciplinary collaboration requires effective communication and understanding. Design thinking helps nurses better understand technological professionals' perspectives and aids them in thinking from their perspectives. Students are able to better understand the intent of technology designers and be able to follow their intent to better design and modify their current workflow-and therefore decrease the resistance of the EHR implementation. For example, by fully understanding the design intent of the EHR designers, nurses can better learn to use EHR and adopt it in their own workflow.
I bring these design thinking concept to my informatics courses. I foster students' 'design thinking' by encouraging them to provide ideas on how to design and develop a new production (e.g., a mobile app). It is a presentation project in BS and a scholarly paper in DNP. Nursing is a unique profession that builds strong empathy with patients. Empathy with users is the foundation for designing new technologies. Nurses know what patients say, do, think, and feel, and they understand patients' needs. This project helps them fully explore users' needs from a designer lens. Different from a technology consumer, a technology designer must first understand the needs of end users, what the potential function of a technology can do for a patient, and what changes are possible for best meeting the needs of users. With design thinking in mind, I observed that, in students' papers about the reasons for the workaround, they complained less about 'technological issues' and had more understanding about the intent and the limitations of technologies. Adopting this attitude will be important for students' future work in real-world settings.
My design knowledge benefits educators, nurses, nursing students, and technology designers, helping them design and develop a new online course interface. The significance of the design can be measured by the number of affected users. Within the past four years, I have contributed to 29 online course interface redesigns, and I have a total of more than 700 students in my 29 online courses. I have also done seven workshops in related areas, college wide and university wide. Students commented that my online course interface is extremely clear and easy to navigate. As the first author of four articles and four presentations in this area, I have also had a chance to embody my creative and well-thought-out ideas through disseminations. More importantly, I have been able to help others utilize my user-centered design knowledge and insights in their online course interface design and technology training programs. My publications in rank underwent peer review and are appealing to national and international audiences.
Through method-driven scholarship, I pose methods of how the quality of performance (e.g., online teaching, research, or nursing intervention) can be improved in the future. This aligns with research aims 1 b-e.
My scholarship activities for research aim 1 b seek to design, test, and implement the novel ways in which nursing students can benefit from learning in a technology-rich environment, and, through them, I can better determine the pedagogical role of technology in student learning. Understanding how pedagogical technology functions allows faculty to identify novel pathways to address some learning issues, such as students' disengagement, confusion, frustration, and overwhelmed feelings, which are major issues that afflict many online nursing students. A key barrier for nursing students to receive a technology-supported learning environment is faculty's lack of knowledge in teaching using technologies. Universal pedagogy is not on the immediate horizon. Evidence is building for the need of pedagogy in nursing education; however, most of the pedagogy are about the methods of learning content delivery.
Little pragmatic research about teaching using technologies in the field of nursing education has been conducted. This does not address the needs of today's nursing students. Much-needed knowledge in this area include technological pedagogical knowledge and technological pedagogical content knowledge. With this knowledge, faculty will be able to devise teaching plans that involve the use of twenty-first-century emerging educational technologies to support their pedagogy, as required by the ever-changing health-care field; deal with emergency technical problems in the middle of a class; or prepare students for roles in technology-rich health-care environments. An example of this type of scholarship is 'Using summary videos in online classes for nursing students: A mixed methods study'. A detailed description of this article can be found at 'Publication' section.
My scholarship activity for Research aim 1 c is to design, test, and implement theoretical frameworks in teaching. An example of this type of scholarship is 'Using STML as a theoretical model for a qualitative case study'. A detailed description of this article can be found at Publication section in the dossier. For research aim ld, my research is not confined to quantitative studies, which are the dominant form of research adopted by scholars, especially in nursing. I conducted two mixed methods research studies, an innovative methodology for conducting research that involves collecting, analyzing, and integrating quantitative and qualitative research. Examples can be found at 'Publication' section. I addressed research aim 1 e through 'Evaluating a fall risk assessment tool in an emergency department'.
What's outstanding about my work in rank is the incorporation of my research findings, which have contributed to teaching using technologies in nursing, especially online teaching. My groundbreaking, innovative scholarly work in rank has gained me a reputation as a wellestablished scholar.
Future Plans on Scholarship Activities
I am proud of the contributions I have made to the fields of teaching and nursing informatics, and the impact my work has had on quality of teaching and healthcare. I have seen noticeable growth in my abilities to review literature, conduct a primary research, and write and publish a manuscript. I feel fortunate to be working in these areas at this moment and am happy to be able to help expand the field's growing body of knowledge. As I enter the next phase of my academic career, my goal is to further expand my two long-term research goals.
The pace at which technology is advancing makes this an exciting time to be working in the areas of teaching using technologies. The rapid digital evolution has created a wide range of technologies available for use in health care education and practice. Future students in healthcare fields will become increasingly tech-savvy and welcome the use of technology in their learning. It presents a great challenge to faculty who continue to use traditional teaching methods that do not integrate any new technologies. Healthcare faculty need to understand how to use technologies to serve pedagogy and enhance students' learning.
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I truly believe that technologies can improve pedagogy and in turn improve students' learning processes in measurable ways. I am driven by a desire to find new ways to use technologies to improve the quality of teaching and health care. I will keep exploring the use of mixed methods in nursing research. Moving forward, my work will continue to be a blend of teaching and scholarly activity. The following are my future plans in this area:
Complete the two manuscripts, with abstracts accepted by SUNY CIT conferences: (1)
'Fostering Nursing Students' Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving Skills in Online Discussion Forums,' and (2) 'Interactive Rubric Design for Online Education: Fostering Student Engagement and Creativity.'
Revise a manuscript about course leveling that was completed but rejected. I will rewrite this aiticle from a different perspective after sending an inquiry letter to some journal editors, such as at Nurse Education Perspectives.
Continue the two projects based on the available data I collected. One is about nursing students' perspectives on the mixed methods research design in their own projects. Another is on students' experiences of using a mobile app to learn about the mixed methods research method. I may publish the related manuscript in Nurse Researcher.
Reflect on my past experience of teaching using technologies, such as Adobe Connect, Google community, Reminder app, Flipgrid app, Twitter, and so on, and write manuscripts. I plan to submit them to International Journal of Design for Learning.
As technology continues to advance, I will expand my research to involve emerging areas of artificial intelligence, big data, ubiquitous sensors, machine learning, and more. I am especially interested in using these new technologies as a tool to customize learning experiences for students. I am eager to explore this emerging area and investigate its impact on teaching and learning. I will thus perform the following:
- Conduct literature reviews and analysis to understand how emerging technologies are used and accessed in health-care education to identify the facilitators, barriers, and gaps in using technologies in nursing education;
- Conduct pilot testing using emerging technologies in nursing education, collecting and analyzing primary data about students' learning processes and outcomes;
- Test the intervention with larger sample size to identify and recommend effective interventions that help promote teaching using technologies in nursing education
The specific time, expected outcomes, number of expected publications, target journals, related long-term research goals, funding resources, budget, research site, participant, and mentors and collaborators for each step can be found at Appendix 15 and 16. The mentors will be the experts in a similar area to establish a long-term network of collaborations by writing together on grants and publications.
Healthcare + Technology + Mixed Methods (for long-term research goal 2)
The next several years will be marked by dramatic advancements in technology: more precise sensors, advanced machine learning, new forms of display through augmented or virtual reality, and the ability to interact with computers through more diverse inputs such as voice or motion. Extensive research is still needed to understand nursing roles, new workflows, patient outcomes, and deliverables in these environments. I look forward to investigating this area using the mixed methods research design to develop insights from a variety of data sets. The following are my future plans in this area:
- I will complete the manuscript, with an abstract accepted at the 2019 QSEN International Forum. 'From Data to Knowledge and Practice: A Framework for the Use of Electronic Health Records.'
- I will repeat the 3 steps in the previous area. The only difference is that it will be in a healthcare setting instead of an educational setting.
- Conduct literature reviews and analysis to understand how emerging technologies are used and accessed in health-care setting to identify the facilitators, barriers, and gaps;
- Conduct pilot testing, collecting and analyzing primary data about nursing's quality of performance and patients' outcomes;
- Test the intervention with larger sample size to identify and recommend effective interventions that help promote nursing interventions in health-care setting.
The specific time, expected outcomes, number of expected publications, target journals, related long-term research goals, funding resources, budget, research site, participant, and mentors and collaborators for each step can be found at Appendix 15 and 16. The mentors will be the experts in a similar area to establish a long-term network of collaborations by writing together on grants and publications.
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