In early March, I had the opportunity to attend a 2-day virtual training program by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) covering the new requirement of competency-based education in nursing programs. AACN is the organization that our CCNE accreditation falls under. The purpose of changing nursing curriculums is needed as recent research has identified that students are not consistently “practice-ready” when they graduate. Students may struggle applying concepts to actual patient situations, so programs need to make sure students are competent in skills and knowledge so they can apply what they’ve learned.
What was particularly interesting to me was how AI was used to develop how the competency was to be written and measured. We had several opportunities to work in breakout sessions with other faculty and an AACN facilitator using AI to format performance expectations and progression indicators of our students. Backward design was utilized to help the participants focus on the final outcomes and explain to AI to write assessment competencies. Examples of training AI to create clear objectives and rubrics was demonstrated and practiced.
Overall, it was a very eye-opening experience to see how AI might benefit faculty and how to use this as a tool. They showed ways to “train” AI to improve on what it was creating. I learned a lot that will prepare me to add clear competencies to the program so the VU nursing students will understand measurable expectations and apply what they learned while caring for patients after they graduate.
