Students’ Satisfaction Regarding the Integration of Educational Podcasts in Nursing Disciplinary Education

Abstract

Introduction. Nursing’s disciplinary foundations include the models and theories that underpin its professional practice, and its teaching-learnning process begin at the start of the nursing career. These contents are difficult to understand and require a high level of abstraction on the part of the student to internalize the concepts, understand the structure of a metaparadigm, its essential components and the differences between them. This poses a challenge, as the use of technology is a support to the teaching-learning process. Given the above, a pedagogical innovation was carried out in a Chilean university through a virtual learning environment that used four educational audio fiction podcasts that considered six nursing models and theories in their contents, which were made available to students on the music playback platform (Spotify®) under the name "Nursing Theorists". Since this was an innovation, it became necessary to assess the students' satisfaction with this educational resource, regarding content, usefulness, ease of use and benefit of the nursing models and theories podcasts in their vocational training. Objective. To assess the students' satisfaction with this educational resource. Method. A quantitative, descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out. The Student Satisfaction with Educational Podcasts Questionnaire (SSEPQ) was used, consisting of 10 items that evaluate the perception of the student regarding the adequacy of the content  (for example, if the content is well organized and the podcast provides clear information on the topic), ease of use, usefulness and benefit to learning (for example, if using the podcast makes the learning process easier or increases student’s motivation). Results. The instrument was applied to 69 students. Since the instrument had not been used before in Chile, an internal consistency test was performed using the global Cronbach Alpha coefficient which indicated high reliability (0.94). 86% of them gave a positive evaluation to the strategy, with better evaluation of content and ease of access. Conclusions. This study allowed us to assess the perception of satisfaction with the use of educational podcasts. The questionnaire is reliable, so conducting a validity study in a larger sample in the future is being considered. The use of podcasts as an educational resource was well evaluated by students, however it requires investigating student preferences about this type of educational resource that can be improved. This requires the addition of qualitative information to contextualize and improve the understanding of results, since satisfaction is a complex variable to measure. Thus, it is necessary to evaluate other indicators such as academic performance to determine the effectiveness of these strategies in learning and developing skills such as critical thinking and soft skills.