A CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT EXPERIENCE IN THE UNDERGRADUATE NURSING COURSE

Introduction:
Modern technologies and their associated tools made available at the service of teaching are increasingly developed and close to teachers and students.
The degree in Nursing has half of its teaching load associated with the practical component, but it still has some curricular units (CU) with theoretical or practical components that, while maintaining the requirement, must be adapted to the innovative trends provided by technologies. At the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP) in Regional Center of Porto, the use of BlackBoard ™ as a teaching support platform is adopted transversally to all academic units.

Objective:
Describe the innovative dynamics and evaluation strategy of a CU of the undergraduate nursing course (UNC) and compare the results obtained with the previous year.

Method:
After an adequate training and exploration of the functionalities available by the platform, an innovative, diverse and motivating form of student participation was structured. In agreement with students were defined quotas for various forms of CU continuous assessment (associated with the dynamization of content): glossary, games associated with the content provided in the CU, online forums discussion, development work and individual evaluations with automatic feedback through learning platform. Periodic evaluations were also performed using online tests, conducted in a classroom supervised by teachers.

Discussion and conclusion:
Given the described proposal, all the students enrolled in the Epidemiology CU of the academic year 2016/2017 chose the option of continuous assessment compared to 23% in 2015/2016. More than half of students (56%) participated in the forum, in the glossary 90% and in the development work 100%. The result of this innovation effort in the method of proposal of the CU under evaluation resulted in the improvement of the student approval rate (to 100%), with an average of 15 values (1 point increase over the previous school year).