When it comes to technology in nurse and nurse practitioner continuing education, some very meaningful advances have recently occurred which undeniably benefit you as the consumer. Here are a few things I personally find fascinating as we continue to move forward with distanced-based education and technology-assisted learning.
Targeted Ads Help you Find Nurse CEU Courses
There’s no denying it, your phone is always listening and tracking your search history and metadata. This seems scary and like big brother is watching you, but when it comes to what you see on your social media, search engines, and sites with advertising, you might actually not want to complain so much.
When advertisers have the power of your metadata, it not only reduces the cost of advertising to the wrong audience. It also allows the consumer to experience less white noise from impertinent ads. Apply this to advertising for nursing and nurse practitioner skills workshops and conferences, this is a very powerful way to reach your audience for groups who may a great resource for learning but don’t have a marketing budget to reach a large audience in more traditional mechanisms of marketing. And if you are already talking about nursing conferences and keyword searching for these, at least you are likely to be visited by pertinent ads rather than gold and silver investment commercials.
Online Continuing Education Platforms
Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific and other similar platforms have considerably raised their game for small companies trying to expand their courses to an online-based audience directly to consumers (B2C). Many offer LTI and API integration to educational software like PowerSchool, Canvas, Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, Edmodo, and D2L so just because you’re not on those platforms doesn’t mean you can’t connect to them for your audience. This also opens up your ability in a business-to-business (B2B). Nearly all now offer API ability to integrate with middleware such as Zapier to connect your website or analytics tools and lead extraction for newsletters. Likewise, nearly all are able to provide web or mobile device-based learning for videos, files, documents, and quizzes.
Apps for Engagement
One of my favorite tools purchased by Skills On Point early in our existence was a large set of audience engagement clickers. We chose a product that required each student or group to use a clicker to poll during live events, which was a total blast for real-time formative learning and gap analysis. Admittedly, this technology quickly went to the wayside as phone-based apps such as Kahoot, Slido, and Poll Everywhere hit the market.
Not only can you get your audience to engage and stay awake for that 2pm lecture on tax code, but you can also get real-time analytics from your members based on their meta-data they provide (years of experience, area of practice, etc). One fun advance is the ability to use this on Zoom for live streaming and recorded online meetings with their polling feature. As a professor at the doctoral level, I frequently use this to help my students engage in the material. The only downside is that you must prepare any polls for any of these resources before initiating the quiz for them to really work the best.
Badge Scanners for Exhibitors
This is really not new tech, but it is certainly an example of technology helping exhibitors and students engage each other with meaningful and specific advertising. By having a handheld scanner as an exhibitor and the attendees have a QR or barcode or RFID chip in their badge, it makes it much faster and less exhausting for attendees to experienced more of the exhibit hall while allowing the exhibitors to reach you with potentially valuable marketing based on your interactions in person. Likewise your metadata from the exhibit provides the exhibitor with the right people to engage with specific products and services to avoid the white noise of impertinent advertising which only costs both parties undue wasted time and expense.
Live Streaming of Nurse Practitioner Continuing Education Courses
This is also not a new concept, but the advancement in tech platforms such as Zoom, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, and BigBlueButton all provide great ways to have high definition video streams with engaging software features such as raising your hand, chat features, and shared screens to help get your audience as engaged as possible. My personal favorite feature on Zoom is the breakout room feature which allows you to assign learners to smaller sub-groups like in a live event and then come back to the main room to have the sub-group present their findings for a quick team-based learning assignment. Pair this with tools such as Zoom rooms, NDI cameras with near-zero latency, and blazing fast internet speeds in many larger conference spaces and the distance-based learner experience has never been more engaging and inclusive.
Hopefully this provides some fun examples of how you can help reach your audience with technology if you’re on the nurse practitioner continuing education teaching side, and if these sound like fun ways to experience a training session as a student, check out all the great live and online continuing education courses where we use these tools regularly at www.skillsonpoint.com!
