NURS 764 Week 7 Project: Distance Learning Strategies Example

Distance Learning Strategies: Building an Online Community of Inquiry Around the Golden Minute for a Junior BSN Cohort

Why the Golden Minute Needs a Community

The golden minute is taught in a single week of a fifteen-week course, but the skill must last through the clinical rotation and the six-week recheck. Between class sessions, students practice alone or not at all, and those who witness a real resuscitation on the unit often have no one to talk with about it. A cohort of forty-eight students meets as a whole group only twice a week, and the students most likely to struggle, including those learning in a second language and those who are anxious about performing, are often the least likely to ask questions in a lecture hall. An online community can keep the topic alive between sessions, give quieter students a way in and connect what happens in class with what happens on the unit. Billings and Halstead (2016) describe online environments as places where interaction must be designed by faculty rather than assumed, and this plan sets out that design.

The Community of Inquiry Framework

Garrison et al. (1999) proposed that a worthwhile educational experience in a text-based online environment depends on three elements working together. The first, social presence, concerns whether people in an online course come across to one another as recognizable individuals and feel that they belong to a group. The second, cognitive presence, concerns whether the group moves from a puzzling question toward an answer it has tested together, rather than trading opinions. Teaching presence is the design, facilitation and direction that bring the first two together toward learning outcomes. The framework suits this project because it treats community as a means to learning, not an end, and because it gives faculty specific levers. Each strategy below is designed to strengthen at least one presence, and together they cover all three.

Six Strategies

1. Video Introductions in Practice Teams (Social Presence)

In week eight, before the golden minute unit, students are placed in the same teams of four they will use in the lab and the escape room. Each student posts a one-minute video in a private team space on the course site, saying their name, where they hope to work and one thing that worries them about attending births. Teammates reply to each other by video or text. The teams then meet the following week already knowing one another, which supports the role-based teamwork the objectives require.

2. A Shared Practice Video Library with Peer Feedback (Cognitive Presence)

Each student borrows a low-cost newborn practice manikin with a bag and mask from the lab for a week and records a one-minute attempt at the golden minute at home or in an open lab room. Videos go to a shared library visible to the cohort. Each student watches two classmates' videos and posts feedback using the same timed checklist used in the lab, naming one thing done well and one to change. Students then record a second attempt. The exercise adds practice repetitions outside the lab and asks students to judge performance against a standard, which deepens understanding of the skill. Students sign a short agreement before posting, promising to use the videos only within the course and to keep feedback about the performance rather than the person, and any student may post to me alone instead of the shared library.

3. A Weekly Faculty Video (Teaching Presence)

Each week of the unit and the clinical rotation, I post a three-minute video that answers questions from the forum, highlights an excellent practice video with the student's permission and previews the next activity. The video keeps faculty visibly present between sessions and lets students hear corrections addressed to the whole group, so no individual is singled out.

4. A Moderated Forum for Stories from the Unit (Social and Cognitive Presence)

A forum invites students to describe, without any patient identifiers, a birth they attended in which a baby needed help or might have, and what they did or wished they had done. I moderate the forum, respond within a day and remind students of privacy rules and of counseling services. The forum extends the debriefings in the clinical plan to the whole cohort, so that one student's experience becomes everyone's learning, and it tells students that strong reactions to these events are shared.

5. Live Online Case Rounds (Cognitive and Teaching Presence)

Twice during the clinical rotation, the cohort joins a forty-five-minute live video session in the evening. I present a case that unfolds minute by minute, and teams work in breakout rooms to decide each next step before returning to compare answers. The cases are drawn, with details changed, from the stories in the forum, which ties the community's experience back to the content.

6. A Question Session with Recent Graduates (Social Presence)

Near the end of the rotation, three recent graduates now working in labor and delivery or the nursery join a live online session to answer students' questions about what the first year was like, including their first resuscitation. Students submit questions in advance, anonymously if they wish. Hearing from nurses only a year or two ahead of them helps students picture themselves in the role.

Equity and Access

An online community can widen gaps if it assumes every student has fast internet, quiet space and confidence writing in English. Thompson and Hawkins (2026) studied forty-one graduate students in an online nursing program whose first language was not English and found that the hardest parts were the hours that study in a second language consumes, the way language shapes exam results and feeling exposed when speaking or writing to others. Their sample was graduate students, but the lessons fit my cohort. Students may reply to the forum by short video or audio as well as in writing, key terms are posted with plain definitions before each live session and no online activity is timed. Students without reliable internet at home can record practice videos in an open lab room and join the live case rounds from a campus computer lab that stays open for those evenings.

Connecting Online and Face-to-Face Learning

The strategies are designed to work with the rest of the project rather than as a separate online course. Stephen et al. (2026) found that interns who received an online session followed by hands-on simulation improved their knowledge and skills more than those given reading materials, with gains sustained at six weeks, which supports linking online preparation and in-person practice. Here, the practice video library adds repetitions between the lab and the clinical rotation, the forum carries the clinical debriefings to the cohort and the live case rounds rehearse decisions that the six-week recheck will test.

Faculty Workload and Sustainability

A community plan that depends on constant faculty attention will not survive a busy semester. I estimate the plan adds about three hours of faculty time per week during the unit and the rotation: one hour moderating the forum and replying to posts, thirty minutes recording the weekly video, an hour reviewing a sample of practice videos and peer feedback and, in two of those weeks, the live case rounds. Two clinical instructors share the forum moderation, and the graduate guests are invited once a year through the alumni office. The practice manikins are already owned by the lab and only need a sign-out sheet, kept at the front desk with the bag and mask sets. Because each strategy uses tools already in the university's learning management system, the plan needs no new software and can be repeated by another instructor from the written guide I will leave in the course shell.

Anticipated Problems

Some problems are predictable. Participation in optional online activities often falls after the first week, so the practice video and peer feedback are graded as complete or incomplete within the unit's participation points, while the forum and live sessions stay voluntary. Students may post feedback that is too vague to help, which is why the feedback form asks for one specific strength and one specific change tied to the checklist. A forum about distressing clinical events could become a place where a student in real distress posts publicly; my daily moderation, a pinned post listing counseling services and a private message to any student who seems shaken are meant to catch that early.

Measuring the Community

I will measure the community in three ways. Participation data from the course site will show how many students posted practice videos, gave peer feedback and joined live sessions, by week. When the rotation closes, a brief survey will ask students to rate their sense of connection to classmates and faculty during the unit and to name the strategy that helped most. Finally, I will compare practice video times between first and second attempts and look at whether students who posted two videos did better on the six-week recheck. If the community works, the cohort will still be talking about the golden minute weeks after the lecture ended, and practicing it too.

References

Billings, D. M., & Halstead, J. A. (2016). Teaching in nursing: A guide for faculty (5th ed.). Elsevier.

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1096-7516(00)00016-6

Stephen, A., Joho, A. A., & Bankanie, V. (2026). Impact of interprofessional blended learning with low-fidelity simulation on neonatal resuscitation skills among interns: A quasi-experimental study in Tanzania. Advances in Simulation, 11(1), Article 59. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41077-026-00451-w

Thompson, C. N., & Hawkins, D. E. (2026). Operationalizing equity-mindedness for graduate English as a second language students in online nursing programs. Journal of Professional Nursing, 66, 170-177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2026.07.001