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 ev
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