Abstract:

Covid-19 hit the United States in March of 2019. Nazareth College quickly pivoted to remote learning for the reminder of the spring semester, with the hopes of going back to in-person learning by the summer semester. We know now how naive that belief was.

The switch to remote/online learning was problematic for many departments at the college since the switch was so fast. It happened over a two week period. It was extra problematic for departments that had a practical component such as the health profession. In addition to the difficulty of teaching hands-on skills online, was the concern about sending students out on internships. How could we make sure that the students were competent and safe to treat patients. In the Physical Therapy Department we were lucky to have back ups.

The Physical Therapy Department at Nazareth College had filmed and posted all hands-on procedures many years ago, so that the students could watched each procedure before they practiced on each other in the lab setting. When Covid19 forced the to switch to remote/on-line learning, those videos allowed us to make sure the students were prepared to go out on internships.

Here is how we did it. The students watched the videos at home, as if they were preparing for a regular laboratory session. They then practiced on a roommate, family member or someone else that they were in close contact with. We did limit who they could practice with to make sure that they did not expose themselves unnecessarily to the Covid19 virus. Then during the normal scheduled laboratory time, the students would all join on zoom. Faculty members would lead the sessions and teach the laboratory with the same instructions as we would normally do, but without the students practicing. The students would then ask questions based on their experiences practicing the procedures at home. If a student had specific questions about the carrying out of the procedure, we could watch the student do the procedure, or the faculty member would demonstrate on another faculty member. Once the students were back in-person at school, the students pass a competency before they were allowed out on internships.

There are commercial videos of most procedures in the health care field. The benefit of having created our own videos to use was that we knew exactly what instructions the students received and the instructions were consistent with how we wanted the procedures to be performed. For the faculty this was beneficial, since we had modified our videos throughout the years to make the instructions clearer and easier for the students to follow.

There will be another pandemic at some point in the future and more than likely we will be back to on-line learning. We realized how fortunate we were to have the videos that allowed us to continue teaching with continuity regarding the hands on component. Our suggestion is that all health care programs and professions that has a practical component create videos of all hands-on components. Maybe we will get lucky and never have another pandemic, in that case the videos will still be helpful as prep material before laboratory sessions.

Keywords:

COVID-19, in-person to on-line, videos.