Donna Meyer:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the April 2026 Elevate Series. I see lots of people joining, and I just put a message to go ahead and introduce yourselves in the chat. It looks like we have individuals from coast to coast. Also, if you want to put the school you're from and maybe your role, that would be great. We're really happy to see so many people joining this Level Up RN series today. My name is Donna Meyer, and I'm an educational advisor for Level Up RN, and have spent many years in associate degree education. And I'm happy to see a lot of people joining that I do know. At this time, I just want to let one of our other colleagues from Level Up RN do a quick introduction and say hello to everyone.
Kelley Larson:
Thank you, Donna. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Kelley Larson, and I'm the Vice President of Learning Solutions here at Level Up RN.
Donna Meyer:
So just as a brief overview, what is the Elevate series? This is our fourth in a series. We believe it's a live, interactive space for educators to join every month and to really look at some real strategies to help in today's nursing programs. As we know, we have many opportunities, but we also have some challenges. These sessions offer many ideas that you can apply right away, new approaches to strengthening clinical judgment and engagement, and also some insight from peers. And I'm very excited today because our peers and presenters are all Odin members. Next slide, please. So today, we're going to do a quick overview of Flashables, which is the platform that is used by Level Up RN. And then we will have different presentations on reducing cognitive overload in pharmacology, streamlining student-student resources, and active learning pre-class prep and in-class application. So I also want to just go over a few Zoom housekeeping. If you want, feel free to put your camera on. We love to see faces. Use the chat for questions, comments, and sharing ideas. You can raise your hand if you want and contribute verbally. And, finally, we do really want to encourage active participation. And so, as our presenters are done, you can ask questions then, or you can hold them to the end. But we really want to make this a very interactive series. So at this time, I'm going to turn it back over to Kelley. She's going to just do a brief overview of the platform.
Kelley Larson:
Thank you, Donna. Next slide, please. So just as a quick overview, some of you may be familiar with Level Up RN, and some of you may just be getting familiar with it. So just to touch briefly, our products include flashcards, content videos, NCLEX questions, and Cram Courses. So it's a series of resources that are coordinated into one platform. And so, Patrick, if I could go ahead and share, I'm going to go ahead and just jump into Flashables and give you a quick tour. Awesome. So I've logged into my Flashables account.
And please know that we do offer free access for nurse educators toFlashables. So, if that's something you haven't signed up for, please know that that is available to you. And so just as a quick tour, so I've signed in with my credentials to our login page here. At the very top, you'll see a series of icons. When I hover over subjects, it's going to pull up a variety of subjects that we offer. And so you can find information this way, or you can also use the search feature down below here if you're looking for a more specific topic.
So I'm going to jump into the dreaded Med-Surg. We know our students really struggle with that topic, and it is commonly something that they feel pretty overwhelmed with. So I'm just going to click on that MedSearch tile. When I click into the MedSearch stack, you'll see that there is almost 400 flashcards in this stack. And then the stack is broken down into smaller stacks based off of body system. Also, from this screen, you'll also see that this is where the practice questions are available to the students, and we have both comprehension and NCLEX with next-gen style questions available. So when I jump into the flashcards here, I'm going to go ahead and click on respiratory system, and you'll see it's filtered it down just a little bit more. And so I've got two different stacks of cards. As I scroll down, I'm able to see all the cards in the stack. So I'm going to jump into this flashcard. And when the flashcard comes up, one of the things that's unique to the Flashables is that both the flashcard and the video present side-by-side. So as this is representing to the student, they're seeing the front side of the flashcard. They're able to down below rate themselves in terms of their confidence level, and then they can go ahead and flip the card. And so it will give them that information.They can also then simultaneously pull up the video at the same time. I'm just going to go back. And so we just looked at subjects. We went into the Med-Surg flashcards. And so now I'm going to just jump into health assessment just to give you a little bit different view. So under our health assessment cards, you'll see they're separated down into those smaller stacks. When I click into the smaller stack, it's going to give me a little bit more information about the cards that are listed there. And then one of the really nice features, so as an educator, if there were specific flashcards or videos that you wanted to be able to pull up in class, you can save them. So you just click on the flashcard to save it. And then you'll see here at the very top, you'll see under saved content, when I click on that, my information will be all here for me. So that's a nice way if you're trying to reference something in your classroom quickly. So you'll see we've got both the flashcards, we've got the videos, and then in addition to that, we've got the practice questions. Also, within our help section here, we've got our Educator Resource Center. And within here, there are very specific practical ideas on how to use active learning with these Level Up RN resources. So, just a quick little overview of kind of how Flashables functions and the resources that are available.
Donna Meyer:
Thank you, Kelley, very much. So now we're going to get into our presentation with our wonderful presenters. First of all, I'd like to introduce Dr. Jen Smith, who is a professor at Harper College in Illinois. And she's also an Odin Board of Directors member. And Jen is going to talk about reducing cognitive overload in pharmacology. Jen?
Jen Smith:
Thank you, Donna. Hello, everyone. As Donna mentioned, I am a professor at Harper College, which is-- if anybody's not familiar with Illinois-- it's just a little bit out of Chicago, outside of Chicago, in the northwest suburbs. And there was a little there was a bit of an adjustment I had. I took a little break from teaching and was in administration, and then I came back to teaching because that is truly where my passion is. And so when I came back to teaching, I shifted my focus because of the needs of the program and took on a course which I never envisioned myself teaching, and that was pharmacology. So when I took on pharmacology, I was eager to find resources that students liked and that they could use, in addition to just kind of taking a little bit of a break, perhaps, from traditional methods of teaching pharmacology. So I recognized that-- actually, it was a recommendation from one or two students about Level Up RN's resources that they were using to succeed in other classes.
And so I looked at the pharmacology offerings in Flashables, and I noticed that the Flashables did an excellent job at prioritizing information. And when I compared different resources for the course, I also noted that there were other options out there for flashcards, frankly, but they were like little textbook pages with so much information. And I felt that that was a little too heavy for the students, related to where I wanted them to be leaving the pharmacology class. Specifically, anybody who is teaching pharmacology on this webinar, I would love to connect with you because I think that we need a little bit of a support group as pharmacology faculty, recognizing that it's many students who don't enjoy pharmacology, unfortunately, even though it is so important. And they feel like they may have to suffer through it. So I do try to find ways to make it as enjoyable for them and as supportive in their learning and understanding the importance. So if we could just advance to the next slide.
What I did with the pharmacology course was I decided to use the Flashables as my overhead slides. That way, the students always had access to the current slides that I was using in class. And we were working with real-time. Part of my strategy in doing so was so that students didn't have to print out pages and pages and pages in PowerPoint notes. I also, as I mentioned, like the way that the information was prioritized for the students on the slides, on the Flashables. And additionally, students could access the Flashables at any point, anywhere, and they weren't waiting for me to open up perhaps a page on the Learning Management System. So they could work in advance if they wanted to and look at the content for the different sections. I also teach the course systems-based. So I also liked how the cards were divided up and how students could tackle it in chunks. And so one of the things my fellow pharmacology teachers may also have the same experience where students will often ask like, "How do I study for this course? How do I study for this course?" So now I've engaged them in what I call a daily prescription of three to five pharmacology cards that they need to memorize. And I did that based on interviews or conversations I had with students who did really well on the first exam, my first semester of teaching pharmacology. They shared with me that what they basically did was memorize three to five flashcards each day so that within a week, between the times that we see each other - because I teach once a week to the three different sections - they will have memorized 35 cards or 35 medications. So that was a way for them to-- it was supported by the research showing the cognitive load of memorizing and so my own personal belief is that they have to memorize the content first to be able to apply it appropriately. And so they would tackle the memorization, and then we can give more application-level questions in the exam, in addition to working through application-level questions in the classroom. So, again, I encourage them to memorize three to five flashcards. What I enjoy now, too, is that I can go in and actually see the students who are engaging and how often they engage. So if they are, I noticed with some students who are not doing well, frankly, they have limited engagement, and then their engagement might peak right before the exam. And that's a way for us to have a conversation when we do some exam reviews, if they're not doing as well as they anticipated in the course, to talk about how studying for pharmacology is more like exercise. To see the benefit, you have to do a little bit every day, and that's really how you're going to build. I use that analogy of the snowball rolling down the hill, building an appropriate base of information to help you be successful on the exams. So, I think there's an example. I don't know if you can see it so well, but again, the cards prioritize information in that they show the students in red, what's important information to know. Some of the cards also have little skulls that actually are important information for the students to know as well. And that way, what I like about the cards and using the cards in class, is that they can pare down all of the information, and it helps them prioritize because I suspect many of us on this call today have had similar experiences with nursing students where they say, "There's just so much content. I don't know what to study." Or, "Can you give me a study guide?" We as a program don't do study guides any longer. So this is a way for me in pharmacology to help the students prioritize. I will say that I know students have this dependency. I wouldn't say it's an addiction, but it's a dependency on PowerPoint. So I have received some feedback from students that they're really tied to PowerPoint, and they miss PowerPoint. But I talked to them about analogies, and I try to explain to them, "Well, it's not that you don't have slides, it's just that you have these slides that are always available to you on the internet, on this program, and you can study at any point, at any place. If you have a phone, you don't even have to have your hard copy cards in front of you." So I try to encourage them to understand that it doesn't have to be PowerPoint. These are slides. And this is the content that's going to be important for future exam use. I should say too, I have both practical nursing students as well as registered nursing students in the class. And so what I like about-- and many of our practical nursing students bridge into the RN program. So we teach pharmacology to all of our nursing students, the same pharmacology course with the same knowledge content areas that are needed for success as a nurse, be it either a practical nurse or a registered nurse. I also have noticed that students have been using the videos that we just saw Kelley show us in conjunction with the flashcards.
They use the videos to reinforce what they're learning in the slides. They also use them to test themselves in terms of what they're learning through Flashables. And I recently learned about students who will play the YouTube videos—I don't support watching the videos [this way], but they'll play the YouTube videos while they're driving to and from school or in transit so that they're actually hearing the information. Because that repetition, the repetitive exposure to the content is so important. I think they sometimes underestimate the amount of time that it takes to memorize content, especially for a course like pharmacology. So, again, we do a lot of conversations related to sports teams analogies and that I am their coach, and they are a member of a professional sports team. And to do the work, they have to put the hours in. So if they want to run a faster 40-yard dash, I can't necessarily practice that 40-yard dash. I will help them, give them ideas on how to do it, but ultimately, at the end of the day, they do have to do the work. So identifying three to five cards and prioritizing them each day helps to chunk that information and break it down into smaller units so that they can memorize the cards and be successful on the exams.
Jen Smith:
The one thing I also just wanted to add-- and I don't think that we're going into detail about this, but I also do use the dosage calculation modules that are available on Level Up RN because we did notice that there were some issues with dosage calculation with our students. And so recognizing that students come to us at different levels and different comfort levels with mathematics and dosage calculation. I really enjoyed, and I will continue to do so, pulling in the dosage calculation modules. I'll assign the modules to them. And it varies in terms of the amount of time that they spend in the modules, but that's all based on-- it's a very student-centered approach, I believe, because, again, some students need to spend more time in the modules to bridge a gap that perhaps they don't have a comfort area with. And so I enjoy using Level Up, and I've received excellent feedback from my students. Once they can reframe the PowerPoint relationship they had, they have said wonderful things. And I do ask students, at the end of the semester, "What helped you in this course, and what hindered your performance in this course?" And consistently, I do get feedback that the use of the Flashables as well as the strategy of memorizing three to five has been supportive of their learning.
Donna Meyer:
Thank you so much, Jen, for that overview. We do have some different questions in the chat. I'll maybe do a couple of them right now, but we can try to go through some of them at the end. But one of the questions-- do the students also read a pharm book? Do they also have a pharmacology book?
Jen Smith:
They don't have a pharmacology book, but what I have done is-- I believe you should go to class to be successful in nursing school. And so I do supplement-- you might notice that some of the cards have some limited information content. So I supplement additional information when I feel that a card might not have what I'm looking for. For instance, on nitrates, there's no mention of a nitrate-free period of time in the 24 hours. So I encourage them to come to class. And then recently, I've been encouraging them to use free resources like podcasts. And I give them specific information about what podcasts to listen to, which can be an additional supplementation of the information.
Donna Meyer:
Thank you. And one more question. Have you seen or noticed, because you've taught before, an increase in test scores with using this method? Have you been able to collect data on that?
Jen Smith:
I have. So I will note that I didn't teach pharm with a textbook, so I don't have a control and a test group to compare. But what I will say is intergroup, I have noticed an improvement in students who are not using the cards initially and then are using the cards consistently, their exam scores have improved. And then the more students do that, they share the information. I have also seen from exam one to exam five, my grades do go up as well, because the more students who learn about it are doing it as well.
Donna Meyer:
And real quick, is the nursing program supportive of you not using a textbook?
Jen Smith:
Yes, they are. In fact, I could just add one piece of it. When I first started it, there is some leeriness about not using a textbook, and it makes people a little uncomfortable. But I didn't enjoy the textbooks that I looked at, so.
Donna Meyer:
Thank you so much. I know there's some other questions. Some of the questions are a little bit general about resources and the cost and things like that. And if we can, we'll get to that at the end, but we'll all put our emails in and you can reach out. I do want to make sure we get to all of our presenters today because they all have excellent information to provide. So I would like to introduce next Amber McCartney and Diana Simmons, who are student outcome specialists from the College of Desert-- the College of College of the Desert in California. And they're going to be discussing Leveling Up Beyond the Classroom: A Systems Approach to Student Success. So I'm now going to turn it over to Amber and Diana.
Amber McCartney:
Thank you, Donna, for the lovely introduction. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amber. I'm joined today by my colleague, Diana. We are going to start off with a quick poll question that I believe we have ready there. Right. So which of the following challenges can you relate to in your program? This is a select all that apply. You do not get penalized for selecting more choices, so select all of them if you would like to. We'll just take a quick poll here as we're waiting for the answers to come in. I will tell you a bit more about our role. So as student outcome specialists, we focus on student-level outcomes like exam scores and academic performance, as well as program-level outcomes like NCLEX pass rates and everything that goes along with that. So we like to think of ourselves as the in-house consultants for our program, faculty and leadership, and a central support resource as well for students, which basically makes us problem solvers. So we've kind of structured our presentation today around that. I cannot see the poll results, but if someone else can and they would like to comment on what everybody said, I can't see it. Oh, there we go. Okay, great. So it looks like almost everyone is dealing with resource overload, about 80%. Remediation for students repeating a course, 63%, and postgrad NCLEX support 24%. Great. We are going to talk about all of these things and hopefully provide you with some information that can be helpful and you can take back to your program. So the first slide we're going to show is just an overview of these challenges. I will explain briefly what each one entails and then we'll go into each solution. So the first challenge, inconsistent access to on-demand support. We know students have resource overload. In our program, previously, these support resources were spread across different locations, different Canvas courses. That's our LMS that we use. And what that meant is that resources were available while the courses were published. And then at the end of the semester, everything disappeared. And during the breaks, this usually left students watching random YouTube videos and hoping for the best. So we wanted to fix that. And our solution was course toolkits. We will show you more about that shortly. For our second challenge, we had a fragmented reinstatement process. So this is for students who are repeating a course or re-entering the program. We do have a process for that. They have to complete remediation and specific assignments in order to rejoin. But this process was very inefficient, not very organized, and a bit fragmented. So we solved that through a reinstatement course. We're very excited to show you about that. And last but not least, our third challenge postgrad NCLEX support gap. So we do, of course, provide NCLEX prep resources for our students as part of program materials, but we felt like something was missing, and we knew that we could do more. So we identified a gap there and filled that gap among other ways by creating in-house NCLEX study plans, which are also part of an NCLEX success course. The overall approach that we used was to centralize and streamline support through our LMS, so our platform that we already have, we're already using and integrating that in a structural way into the systems that are already in place in our program. All of these solutions are workarounds. This is one of my favorite parts. They're all workarounds that we were able to implement immediately at no cost with no curriculum proposals or policy changes required. And anyone who's tried to submit a curriculum proposal knows how that process goes. So we're a short path from point A to point B type of team, and so this definitely accomplished that for us.
Amber McCartney:
The first thing we're going to show you about is our solution to problem number one. So our next slide is just our tile for our Canvas course. So I'll tell you really quickly, this is our Nursing Student Success course on Canvas. It is a manually created course. Regardless of what LMS you're using, there is an option for a manually created course which is not tied to institutional enrollment. It's not tied to term start and end dates. So it's a permanent resource that is there 24/7. Students join one time, and they remain in it for the duration of the program. So just so you know that that's the setup we were going for here. And the course toolkits are at the heart of this project. And I will let Diana take it now, and she's going to walk us through what this course looks like for students to navigate.
S5:
All right. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you, Amber, for your introduction and leading us to the course toolkits. If we can please go to the next slide. So when students log into Nursing Student Success, they're taken to the landing page where they can pick their course toolkit, and it's organized by their course numbers. We've created toolkits for each of our fundamentals theory courses and our specialty areas, including mental health, Gero, pediatrics, and OB. Additionally, we've also created toolkits for our VN and CNA students. Next page. Now, each toolkit is like a one-stop shop for all of their supplemental study needs. Here, we've incorporated resources from Level Up RN. And their team has made it really easy for us by mapping out our course outlines. And this allows us to just plug in the content wherever we need it. Our theory resources here are grouped by exams. So when students click on weeks one through four to prepare for their first exam - next slide - they are directed to this page with videos and flashcards that are organized by topic. Each link connects them directly to the materials on Level Up RN, and this makes it quick and convenient for students to use.
Amber McCartney:
So we love this course. Students love this course. We have already seen the impact of this. It's been in place for coming up on a year now. We've got about 350 students in our program that are enrolled. And through the Canvas Analytics feature, we can see student activity. And in this course, we average about 10 to 15 thousand page visits weekly. So students are accessing this. They're using it. It's very convenient. Everything is consolidated. It's familiar. It's in one place. It's on a platform they're already using. So it does reduce that resource overload for them. They like that it's all organized and right there in one location. The best part for us is that there is no gatekeeping. So students can access the material. Students in any course can access the content for any other course at any time. So this means they can go back and review they can work ahead, they can get ahead during the breaks, which a lot of students tell us that. So during summer and the winter, this is there. It doesn't go away, so they can prepare and get ahead for their next course. So this is really just putting them back in the driver's seat of their own learning, facilitating that independent, self-directed learning process, and really just giving them access to whatever they need whenever they need it. So that's our Nursing Student Success Canvas course that we have with those toolkits featuring the content review with Level Up RN. And we will keep on trucking and move on to our next thing, which is our nursing reinstatement course. So following the success of the toolkits, when we were trying to tackle this reinstatement challenge, we decided, "You know what? Let's just do the same type of thing because it's working so well." This is another manually created Canvas course. So it's not tied to term start and end dates. It's available beyond the end of the semester. So it's available during those non-primary terms when students are completing their remediation assignments to re-enter the program or to repeat a course. So we decided to move everything here, just again, to centralize, streamline. It makes communication easier, much more organized for students' assignment submissions that they have to turn in. And again, putting them back in the driver's seat, just giving them more control over the process. So Diana's going to walk us through the reinstatement course.
Diana Simmons:
All right. So when students are accessing this, students returning to the nursing program after a course failure are assigned what we call a remedial course module. And each module is structured as a four-week review course that are taken during the off-term, so during our summer and our winter breaks. Each week, the students are assigned videos, flashcards, and quizzes from Level Up RN, and they have to complete them by the end of the week, before they can progress to the next week. This weekly structure holds students accountable in reviewing every week, and it also prevents them from cramming everything in until the very last minute. The individualized remediation work is assigned in a to-do format, and it makes it very clear for students what they have to complete and when to complete them by. Now, if we click on Level Up RN's assignment for week one, it will take us to this page where the directions and the links to Level Up RN are right there for the students, and it just makes it so much easier for them to access. Next slide. If we click on one of those links, this is where students will see all of the videos and the flashcards and quizzes assigned for that specific week.
Amber McCartney:
Many benefits to this type of setup. Basically, it removes all the barriers for accessing resources. We don't have to worry about students who have been out of the program for a long time and maybe don't have their product activation codes or something has been updated in the program resources or curriculum. None of that matters. This is all available to them, again, 24/7 year-round. It also provides a more structured remediation pathway. We had these assignments before, but putting it in the format of the Canvas course keeps them in the routine of studying weekly, completing the assignments, turning things in on time, that time management, many of the things that students had struggled with initially that made them unsuccessful. This is really facilitating that aspect of the remediation as well. So we are implementing this for the first time this semester, so we're excited to see the difference that it makes. But already, just the organization and the streamlined communication is going to be huge for us and for the students. It just makes it easier for everyone. So we're really looking forward to that. Okay. We're going to keep going. This is just a rapid fire here. But next is our NCLEX Success course. So this is, again, a manually created course for our graduating students. Most importantly, it is available beyond graduation because it's not tied to the term end date or their enrollment in other courses or anything. So this is available for them as long as they need it. And the purpose here is to bridge that gap between graduation and licensure. The core of this course is our built-in NCLEX study plans, which are made up of resources that the students already have access to within the program free of charge. We are a community college, so we have a lot of non-traditional students, and they would tell us all the time they were nervous about graduating because they don't have the budget to spend hundreds of dollars on a third-party prep course. And obviously, they don't have to. We have all of these things available to them already. So when they log into this course, they are brought to a landing page, some NCLEX information, the general information what to expect. We have a registration link for the mock NCLEX experience we provide for them here on campus. They have three recommended study plan calendars. Those are printable calendars they can print out with checkboxes to check off their progress and everything they do each day. Within the Canvas course here, if they click on one of the study plans, it takes them to a weekly overview with a day-by-day breakdown of what they're studying each day. And then when they click on one of those days, it will take them to the following page where they have a detailed checklist of everything to work on for that date. This is day four of week one of the four-week plan, which is quite condensed, so there's a lot here. And this is based around three different activities. They do case studies, and then they do their content review and quizzing through LevelUpRN. And then they have their practice testing and those review questions through Kaplan, which is our NCLEX prep vendor. I just have to say when we launched this last semester and we had all of our fourth semester students together in the theater and we talked to them and put the study plans up on the big screen. And it was this huge collective sigh of relief. They were so grateful and have been just so thankful and receptive to have this. It was optional when we first launched it last semester because it was new. But with the success and how this has been received, it's now a required part of some of the assignments students have in their fourth semester in their transition to practice course, where they have to join the NCLEX Success Course, choose their study plan, and work that into their postgrad plan for their transition to practice. So we're really happy about that and thankful for the collaboration with our fourth semester instructors to help make that happen. So that is our NCLEX Success Course. So those are our three solutions. With that, I'm going to hand it back over to Diana, who's just going to share a little bit of student feedback, and then we will wrap up with a final poll question.
Diana Simmons:
All right. So to conclude, we'd just like to share some feedback from our students that we've received during a recent survey. And it really shows the difference of what LevelUpRN has made for them. One student shared that LevelUpRN was a helpful resource that aligned with our curriculum, and then another student found that the organization of our resources actually made the course more manageable for them. Then we had an ambitious student share that they used LevelUpRN to study ahead for their future courses. This is a pretty common theme. They're eager to get ahead during the breaks. It makes them feel more confident and less anxious because they know what to expect. And this gives students more control over their own learning. And finally, a final semester student actually shared that they wish they had these resources from the beginning of their nursing program. Unfortunately for this student, we didn't have LevelUpRN then when she started the program, but it shows that LevelUpRN can be used in a very cohesive way from the very beginning to the very end of a student's journey in our program.
Amber McCartney:
All right. So we'll put our final poll question here, which is, which one solution would you most want to implement in your program? So as everyone is answering here, I will just let you know that we have a PDF one-page summary handout in the resources that you can download. It has our contact information on it if you're interested in learning more. And to anyone here who has someone in their program in a similar role to our role as student outcome specialist-- you might call it a success coach, academic coach, success navigator. Everyone has their different term.
Diana Simmons:
Remediation specialist, yeah.
Amber McCartney:
Yeah. So if they would like to connect with us, we're always happy to do that and meet more of our kind. So put them in touch with us, and we'd be happy to chat further anytime. And we hope this was helpful for you.
Donna Meyer:
Thank you so much. And it looks like we're getting-- according to the course toolkits available year-round. Looks like it's winning out at 59% at the moment. Thank you so much. I know there's been a few more questions in the chat, but I think in the interest of time, because I want to make sure we can get to all of our presenters, we will move forward to our next presenter. Our final presenter is Charise Lavarreda, and she is a nurse practitioner and faculty member at Cerro Coso Community College in California. And she is going to discuss active learning through pre-class preparation and in-class application. So Charise, take it away.
Charise Lavarreda:
Thank you. So I think I'm going to just build off of what Jen, Amber, and Diana have kind of already talked about, thinking outside the box and presenting information to students in a new, engaging, fun way, which was really my motivation for kind of changing my classroom setting. So if we can go to the next slide. So I use a flipped classroom to do this. I provide pre-recorded lectures for the students to watch on their own time prior to coming to class. Each chapter, I try to keep the recorded lecture roughly 30 minutes. Of course, sometimes that's a little over and a little under depending on the content that I'm covering. And then they come to class prepared. We do short micro in-class lectures, 5 to 15 minutes. And that is where I just really hone in on the bigger concepts of the content that we've covered for that chapter. And then we spend our classroom time moving about the classroom, really doing application-based learning. And I do this in various ways. I forgot I actually had a-- there we go. Thank you. A quiz. I'll give you guys a few seconds to go through that.
Charise Lavarreda
Great. I'm excited to see that there are several-- about half of you guys are using flipped classroom. And I really think the students enjoy it. I've done it now for three semesters. And all three semesters, the students have had positive feedback. So again, that was kind of the motivation was, when I very first started teaching, I would look out at my classroom, and they just were so disengaged when I was standing in front of them lecturing. The nodding heads, the scrolling on their tablets, clearly not engaged and so I knew something had to change. And so I'm going to go through and talk about how I'm doing this utilizing Level Up RN resources. And so these are kind of four of my go-tos, ticket to class, low stakes graded assignments, group activities, and the extra class time. And what I mean by that is, oops, my lesson plan did not time out as I thought it would, and I have too much time left, and I need something quick to fill that time. So I'll show you an example of a ticket to class here. So I will post this in my LMS. We use Canvas. So I'll post to them. Here is the link. I am able to use the mapping resources to easily get the link. I put it in there and I say, I want you to watch these videos, list three preoperative nursing interventions, tell me one nursing intervention from intraoperative and PACU, and what are some expected findings in the postoperative period that we're going to see. And I have them-- I normally will accept it in two ways. One, they can upload it to the LMS, or I even will take it if they bring it in class and hand it to me in person. I just want to know that they have watched the pre-recorded videos. They're looking at the additional resources with Level Up RN, and they're ready to really dive into the information that day. So that is how I have used Level Up RN as a ticket to class. And this is not graded. It's expected.
And then low-stakes graded assignment. So how I use this is after class is done, I normally will again upload this into the LMS and I will give them the link and I'll tell them, "Today we covered the nervous system. I want you to watch this video, review flashcards." I'm very specific on what I want. So 153 to 158 and complete four NCLEX questions. They will upload this into the LMS system by whatever time I say. So 5:00 PM. And the reason I give them a short amount of time is just because literature says that kind of having them do that right after the classroom, it helps tidy up all of the information they learned and kind of really drive home the main points. And so that will be maybe worth five points. Something like this would probably be worth about five points. So low stakes, it's not a huge hit if they don't get it done, but it encourages them to utilize the resources and gives them one more opportunity to look at the information. And then I have also used Level Up RN as one of my group activities. My students love group activities in general. And I know as I've been doing these with Level Up RN and even just talking to other faculty members from sister colleges and whatnot, and they're, "Oh, your students like group activities, and they really do." And I actually do group activities where it's randomized. So I have colored tongue depressors here, and I walk around the classroom, and they choose a color. And that's how their group is formed for that day. And then with this example, here's your link. I want you to watch the video, review the flashcards, and I want you to create three NCLEX style questions. This is a longer group activity, so this sometimes will take my whole 45 minute or 50-minute block. Anyhow, they will do this. I'll give them a time to have it completed. They're all in the classroom. They're not leaving anywhere, but they're in their groups. And I'm cruising around. I'm guiding them to the right areas that I want them to really make sure that they're covering. We come back. They'll do a short three-to-five-minute summary of the topic presentation to their other peers. And then we take the NCLEX questions and we pass them to the next group. And we have to peer review their NCLEX questions using our textbook. And so, they love this because, of course, sometimes if they find a group who they want to-- are you sure this is the right answer? We pull the textbook out and we're always peer reviewing. And it's a great activity and good engagement and the collaboration and really good conversations come from this activity. And then lastly is what I have found in the last two to three semesters since I've implemented this is because it's new, sometimes I misjudge how long activities are going to take.
And so I will have extra time, and so a couple of times I was like, "Oh, what am I going to do? I still have 30 minutes of classroom time." And so thankfully, because Level Up RN does provide the mapped resources, I was able to-- students had no idea. I pulled up the mapped resources and let's review this subject and tell me what the priority is. So just a rapid review of what we had covered that day. I love the Teach Back Challenge, so I'll assign one or two cards per student and have them explain to their peers in 30 to 60 seconds what they reviewed on those cards. And then clinical connection, so this will be in a more open dialogue. What are some real patient scenarios we might see, and we'll connect those to the flashcards that we've reviewed. How is this going to look in practice? And so I feel like these really help the students in the nursing process, helps them with that, recognizing their cues, analyzing, prioritizing, generating, taking action by giving them the safe space in the classroom. My students, the feedback that I've gotten is that they enjoy the pre-recorded lectures. I can't say I've never heard the-- well, it kind of stinks having to do that beforehand. But overall, and even the students who have made those comments come back and say, "You know what, though? We really like having the prerecorded lectures. We can listen to them again." They can speed up the time. And when they're studying for their exams and stuff, they can re-watch them, and they really enjoy that. And I think I covered everything that I was going to. Oh, my structured class time, I was going to talk about that. So I try to do blocks of 50 minutes of engagement, 10-minute break, and then we come back and do another 50 minutes of engagement. So most of my activities, sometimes I'll do two short activities in that time frame or the group activity that I shared with you guys, that takes the whole block. And sometimes even when we come back from our 10-minute break, we'll have to pick up and finish up. But I do try to give them so that they know that they're going to have a bathroom break.
So I'm seeing some of the questions in here. My average class size for my VN, we have 15 students. So we're a pretty small community college, and RN is 10 students. I do think that some of these would work even with bigger groups. Obviously, you're going to have to modify it to some degree, but I think it would work. Donna--
Donna Meyer:
Did you see the one about consequence for ticket to class, that they didn't do that? That was in the chat.
Charise Lavarreda:
I did. I glanced down, and I saw it. And I decided that I would address it this time.
Donna Meyer:
Okay. Perfect.
Charise Lavarreda:
Yes. I don't turn them away from class, although some of my peers think that if I'm going to have a ticket to class, that it has to be that stern. I don't want to take away the opportunity of the day, and they have to come to class. They're expected to be in class. So what I do in that usually is I'll talk to them about time management. Why are they not getting it done yet? Have they not watched the videos yet, or not watched the prerecorded lecture? And I talk to them. I take that opportunity on trying to drive them into good time management and coming to class prepared. It has not been an ongoing issue for me, though, for students not to come with their ticket to class done.
Donna Meyer:
Thank you so much. I know there's a lot of different questions going along. And we have one more poll here, I think. We want to look at that real quick. So quickly, it's people still responding.
Charise Lavarreda:
So it depends on what course I'm teaching. And because we are a small community college, I teach multiple courses. We meet on Monday, or we meet twice a week in general. Some of our shorter courses, we meet once a week. And usually, it's for a minimum of an hour and up to three hours, depending on the topic or the course.
Donna Meyer:
Okay. So I'm going to turn it over to Kelley now, and she's going to just kind of get some more questions going and try to respond. There's been so much, and it's just been great.
Kelley Larson:
No, and really, thank you to our presenters. I think this information has been incredibly helpful. I wanted to just take a moment here. If anybody would like to come off mute and ask our presenters questions, let's go ahead and do that at this time. And so if there aren't questions or if you feel more comfortable putting your question in the chat, we'll make sure that our presenters are able to answer those questions and get back to you.
Donna and I have had the pleasure of hosting our Elevate series now for four times and are excited for what we'll be offering in May. I know during the beginning of our time together today, there was a little bit of conversation around dosage calculation. And we know that this is such a difficult topic. Students struggle with the math. They struggle to carry the skills forward. And then they really struggle when we're trying to put both the clinical skills together along with the math.
So on May 21, please join us for our next event, and we'll be diving deeper into dosage calculation and uncovering some of those challenges. Also, we want to extend an invitation to each of you. If you have some interest in being a presenter, please know that we are always looking for educators to participate in our webinar series. And so if that's something you're interested in doing, please reach out to Donna And then final piece of business for us today. If you are interested in learning more about Flashables, today I did just a very brief walkthrough just to kind of orient everybody to what the product is. But there are a ton more features. We've got dashboards, we've got analytics, we've got syllabi mapping. We've just added dosage calculations. So if you're interested in learning more, we'll be hosting a session on Tuesday next week. Feel free to go ahead and register. If that time doesn't work for whatever reason, don't hesitate to reach out to us, and we'll certainly set up a time to do a walkthrough. Rose, I see you've got a hand up. You've got a question? Perfect.
Rose:
Yeah. I just do have a question because I actually use nursing cards in school when I was in nursing. But what I would do is I would-- Flashables are great. I love them. In fact, I joined while we were chatting because the students are always asking, "How can we do this? What can we do to help?" But I just have a question. From research, it always says that when you're writing, you're reading the information, you're writing it on the flashcard, and then you're able to memorize it. So what is a way to help the students through that not writing it down? Because as you know, different students learn differently. How do you all advise?
Jen Smith:
I could jump in on pharm, and then I'll step back and see if anybody else has other ideas. So what I liked about using the flashcards through Flashables is that I can make sure that the students have the notes that they should have. Because sometimes I feel that during lecture, when they take notes, they might capture what you said incorrectly. So I'm able to speak to the notes as well as they have the notes. They have access to the notes. Then if they come to see me, some people are really good at memorizing. So they might not need additional support. But in the first day, we talk about how can you memorize things since there are variable levels of comfort with memorizing in the classroom. So we say somebody might be able to just do the three to five by carrying them around each day and reviewing, reviewing. But I also do say that some of you are going to need to write these things out. So take your flashcard and write it out and write it out and write it out. And then we also acknowledge there might be another group of you that not only have to write it out, but then also read it out loud to yourself over and over and over again. So we do talk about how to address that so that it's not just this passive learning process, it is involving them throughout the entire semester in multiple ways.
Rose:
Yeah. Because we always do tell them there's different ways to obtain information depending on the course you're in. And I do like how you all talked about that sometimes you have to record yourself because my nephew is now in CRNA school and we were talking about different study strategies. And he said that one of the things that he does is he reads his note, records himself, and then - excuse me - while he's driving, he listens to the information. So it's just hard sometimes to get students to understand that these modalities work. My biggest challenge is telling them-- because I do mostly clinical, but I still hear about test-taking is I tell them, "You shouldn't be studying two hours before your exam." Get a good night's sleep. And they tell me, "You just don't understand." And I said, "Remember, I went through nursing school." So that's a hard sell sometimes to teach them, "There's different teaching modalities for you to understand and learn the information."
Jen Smith:
Yeah. If I could just add, too, what I like about the dashboard as well for us at Harper is that I can go in and see how much the student is engaging with the Flashables. So if there is a student that's saying like, "I'm studying and I'm studying. I'm studying. I just don't understand why I'm not doing well," I can go in, and we can look at their engagement with the Flashables together. And it's an opportunity for them to be a little bit more self-reflective and maybe a little bit more honest with themselves about how frequently they are studying.
Rose:
Great. Thank you. It was great.
Donna Meyer:
Well, we are at the top of the hour, it looks like. We finished on time, amazingly enough. Oh, one more new thing just popped up, I think. Again, we want to emphasize, and I loved how some people had the little emojis going up with the love, the balloons, and everything. Thank you so much for that. Please email—All the emails have been put in the chat numerous times. And we are happy to set up individual Zoom meetings with your entire faculty, with just a couple people, your dean, if you're not the dean, to explain more on how this works.
I know there's been a lot of questions too about Flashables, as well as pricing. Angelina, who's the customer service specialist, definitely can help with that. But feel free. We are here to help you. We understand, as I said at the very beginning, opportunities for nurse educators, but also the challenges. So, again, thank you so much for joining. We'd like to thank OADN for putting this communication out and all of our speakers who worked very diligently to provide this information today. And you all have done an amazing job. And we also thank all of you for attending and staying honest with us today. Inow the semester's getting close to the end, so hang in there. I remember those days as a nurse educator, and I hope you have a great day. Thank you so much.
