Abstract:

In university nursing education, students beginning their education lack technical attentiveness when starting the learning in an e-learning environment.

These breaches in awareness comprise need of thoughtful course delivery, partaking in asynchronous course activities, contacting resources distantly, and utilizing of rising health care technologies.

Most graduate nursing programs use online e-learning methods to deliver theory-based course content. With the shift toward increasingly more complex computer technologies being incorporated into online programs, nurses pursuing graduate education often are not fully prepared for the expectations in computer literacy needed for achieving success in an online environment.

A national report outlining the critical issues in higher education points out that many students with the ability to benefit from an advanced degree do not receive the academic support they need to complete their higher education program. Although research has focused on the technological needs of undergraduate students, little attention has been given to the specific barriers graduate nurses face when returning to school. Yet coordinators at a consortium of three universities offering a master's of science in nursing (MSN) program recognized the need for resources when the program transitioned from face-to-face and video conferencing formats to an online delivery format.

This paper discusses the implementation of an e-Learning component in a university undergraduate nursing course using Google Documents and identifies the factors which contributed to its success while considering a modern collaborative orientation course that reproduces course performance so that nursing students get a true viewpoint of what e-learning entails.

Keywords:

e-learning, Critical Success Factors, Google Docs, Collaboration.