Nurse “Webinars” The Future of Education?

credit: cogdogblog

** Guest Post by Richard Williams of Rich Nurse Poor Nurse

Nurse “Webinars” in 2010

I have been nursing for 21 years now and for the past ten years I have been working in Patient Transport here in Bathurst. In Patient Transport I get to visit a lot or rural and metropolitan hospitals. I notice that they all have one thing in common…the nurses are always very busy and health dollars have never been tighter. I have been thinking about how hard it must be for nurses to:

1. Find the time to attend educational in-services on their wards,
2. Get released from work or funded to attend conferences or seminars (domestically or internationally) to be able to keep abreast of the latest information pertaining to nursing or their specialty area.

I believe that I have a possible solution to this problem. I recently presented a paper at a conference and I felt very privileged to firstly have my paper accepted and secondly to be able to attend the interstate conference. I did my presentation on PowerPoint and it was well received and I had requests from the audience to forward on my findings.

I am now aware of relatively new technology that would enable a nurse anywhere in the world to view my presentation either live and be able to ask me questions and interact with me or view it on playback after it was recorded. This is if I turned my PowerPoint presentation into what is called a “webinar”. A webinar is a presentation eg PowerPoint that is broadcast over the internet where people can register and join in and view it at a scheduled time and can interact with the presenter and ask questions. If they miss the live version they can view it online and play it back like a video file.

Webinar Technology

What is really exciting is that there are nurses all around Australia and the world who present papers at a conferences or seminars who could easily record their power point presentation(how most are presented nowadays) with their own commentary as a webinar. Any nurse that has a PowerPoint presentation (not just those that have been presented at a conference) could turn their presentation into a webinar for the benefit of all nurses. The webinars would run at a scheduled time and my subscriber members would be notified via email when it was to be live. I would have instructional videos on my website that teach members how to use the webinar software, so that they could record their own webinar.

Once recorded a webinar can then be added to a website. I would add the webinars (or have a video to teach members how to do it themselves) to my website to build a library of pre-recorded webinars given by a variety of speakers on a large variety of topics. My website would be a bit like YouTube where the users add their own content, visitors comment on them and can see how many times a webinar has been viewed. On the website there would be a schedule of upcoming webinars showing the topic and speaker so nurses could join in and hear them live or view them at a latter time when it suited them.

I believe that my concept of pooling and sharing our presentations as webinars can benefit nurses from all round the world. It will be a big undertaking for me to set this up so I need to know via a short survey if nurses would watch webinars and use my website? Nurses could either use the webinars as a training tool at work and/or at home where there maybe more time and fewer distractions. A nurse could subscribe as an individual and/or an Area Health Service could subscribe so that their nursing staff could view the webinars. I am looking at doing a professional job of this so would need to charge an affordable fee for service for the end users.

Short Survey

Please click on the link to complete the short survey on webinars for nurses. Click Here to take survey

Just think that one day soon you may not be disappointed when you miss out on attending a national nursing conference as you know you can catch the speaker’s presentation at a latter time as a webinar. Or maybe you yourself will be giving a webinar that is watched live on-line by up to a thousand nurses from all around the world and then viewed by thousands of nurses once it’s downloaded onto my website.

Thanks Rich