Research Center REACH

THE ADVANTAGE AND FUTURE IMPACT OF VIRTUAL MOBILITY IN NURSING EDUCATION

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Virtual mobility has pedagogical advantages and enriches the more traditional learning activities in nursing education. The learning process can be improved through interactive and collaborative learning. It integrates students in a collaborative learning environment while keeping the benefits of a structured presence in a university campus.
Furthermore, as indicated above, virtual mobility creates opportunities for those students unable to participate in a traditional class. Given the scarcity of mobility grants, it provides an affordable opportunity for more higher education students than physical mobility, from which only a small minority of students are presently able to benefit.
Today most of the virtual mobility occurs with students from developing countries taking courses in more advanced countries such as Europe, Australia and North America. Although, it may improve the quality of developing countries’ educational institutions, it deprives students in the more developed countries from the benefits of expanding their knowledge of nursing and nursing education and using it to expand their student’s perspectives.
Because there are more new options for educational programs, students usually find international programs more attractive. Consequently, domestic universities are losing their students, which also means losing opportunities to diversify training specializations and further their delivery capacity. In fact, some universities have initiated a new cooperation such as the ‘sandwich’ program or double degree program for example. In these programs, students will attend the first part of their course in their home country through online or face to face courses before finishing their program in an international university. Currently this opportunity is often disadvantaged because the home university courses are only given about half of the credits given at the international universities. In another words, there is a gap in recognition of domestic and the destination institutions. Considering the nature of cooperation, it appears that universities of developing countries just merely play the role of marketing and administration for their Western partners. Virtual mobility between universities at the moment is closer to the shifting of online students from overseas to geographically domestic learning; but not yet giving both sides a two-way exchange of teaching methodology or researchers.
Virtual mobility encourages networking and synergies between nursing institutions and will lead to a better quality of the programs and courses offered. Furthermore, this program increases broader participation in learning, in the same time and different places. Greater benefit in virtual mobility can create attractive learning environments for nursing student.
A pilot program using these methods needs to be devised and tested to enhance the development of nursing education.

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