Multimedia learning with video - Didactic success factors to master psychomotor skills in health professional education

Psychomotor nursing skills are inherent to health professional education in nursing, midwifery, and medicine. These skills are of varying complexity, requiring the student to perform physical movements efficiently and effectively, with the necessary speed, accuracy, and underlying reasoning. Learning to master these skills requires an optimal didactic approach that promotes retention and transfer. Multimedia learning with video provides an added value since Mayer (2014) states that students “can learn more deeply from words and pictures than from words alone”. Videos can be used as a demonstration tool, with students observing the nursing skill. This allows students to learn autonomously at their own time and pace, with the possibility of pausing, repeating and optimal visibility of the actions. When designing a demonstration video, cognitive overload should be avoided by presenting only essential information to the visual and auditory channel. Learning is promoted by keeping videos as short as possible and providing words and pictures coherently. Asynchronous use of demonstration videos, where students prepare the new content independently (flipped classroom) allows the rather scarce synchronous classes to be used for simulation with task trainers in a safe skills lab environment. Simulation allows students to practice psychomotor skills. To improve and refine skills, feedback is crucial. To generate accurate feedback, video can be used as an assessment tool. Recording the student’s performance during formative and summative assessments, allows teachers to annotate and provide student feedback through concrete footage. Moreover, these video recordings can also be used for observational learning, hereby creating didactic opportunities by means of self-, peer- and tutor assessment. The aim of this doctoral project is to investigate how a multimedia learning environment with video can be designed to promote mastering psychomotor nursing skills within health professional education: (1) Didactic success factors of video as a demonstration tool: to what extent does autonomous learning through observation of video demonstrations provide learning gains compared to real-life demonstrations? (2) Didactic success factors of video as an assessment tool: to what extent can video be used in simulation to generate reliable, accurate and objective feedback?