While at work over the last few days, I have spent a few hours browsing iTunes U for various Nursing vodcasts. It's really, really fascinating to see how other schools teach their students. For those who don't know, iTunes U provides a medium for educational institutions to post video or audio feeds of their lectures, and they are free to view for anyone who has iTunes (also free). There are lectures on every subject you can think of. I love to just browse different topics and learn. The other day I watched a vodcast about Relativity. For no real reason, just because I could. [Photo Credit]

My school, new as it is, was built as a 'smart' institution with microphone hookups and live feed capabilities in pretty well every classroom. It doesn't currently participate in iTunes U, however. I think my school is concerned over privacy issues and intellectual property. I have this dream that instead of burying their heads in the sand and choosing not to address the promise of global education, our nursing faculty would embrace the accessibility of information and begin to publish some of our classes. (Check out the iTunes U how-to guide!)

I find it very exciting to think of how this technology could be utilized by the nursing community at large. For curious students (or would-be students!) like me, it is an easily accessible look at various aspects of nursing and it can introduce us to all kinds of specialties that we may not have known about. How awesome would it be to browse to a central organization website like the CNA, and be able to find and view lecture classes for specialties that you might be interested in? I am thinking specifically of the CCU certification I am interested in, or other advanced Post-RN coursework available at my university like Advanced Wound Care. You could utilize other schools' lectures to supplement your own - maybe to get a different point of view on difficult concepts, or to expand on something that you found interesting. You could even see how other student nurses in the world are learning.

On a larger scale, this could be utilized as refresher courses for distance learning or a video log of the entire class you took. I, for one, would LOVE a v-library of my lectures. I would pay extra to have a permanent record of the classes I take. I feel like I only ever take away about 30% of the information from any given lecture, because really, there's just way too much information assaulting my neurons at once. And how great would a v-library be for studying??

Imagine being an outpost nurse who is planning a community-scale intervention in diabetes management. Sure, you can spend hours and hours digging up relevant research (and you probably will), but imagine if you could visit the site for The Diabetes Nursing Interest Group and find podcasts for the most up-to-date EBP based on current research.

In short, you could find out how other nurses are nursing, straight from the specialty's organization. They could put out quarterly updates with new information or the latest in EBP.

How is this different from the newsletters or PDF publications that are already sent out, you ask?

The big differences would be accessibility - anyone could view this information, not just the organization and not just nurses (!) - and method of delivery.

Reading through a 37-page PDF is a lot more tedious and abstract than viewing a 10-minute video showing the latest in nursing interventions. How much easier is it to learn when you can actually watch a video of a nurse interacting with a patient, instead of just reading about it? Things that are best shown visually with an accompanying explanation, like new methods for IM injections or crisis interventions.

The possibilities are massive. This could theoretically be on a huge scale, with global involvement. Ideally, having this kind of information available from such reputable sources (CNA, PHAC, and NIH, to name a few) in such an incredibly accessible format - over 200 million iPods sold, worldwide! - could even be utilized to educate and influence public health. Inexpensively... AND "upstream" in that nebulous idea of primary health care.

I believe people are becoming increasingly open to being involved in their own preventive health maintenance (anyone notice how popular the Doctors have become? I laugh every time I see them in their pristine TV scrubs). I think that good, reliable information is hard to come by. Google any medical question and you're going to get 2,000 results from Yahoo! Answers or wrongdiagnosis.com. The world is ripe for reliable information at our fingertips. This kind of health information is mostly an untapped market, IMO. I find this all very very exciting.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that post secondary education and research isn't off in some ivory tower (or imposing brick-and-ivy academia) anymore. You don't have to get periodicals from the library to keep up with the current knowledge base. Any layperson can experience the post-secondary environment for free via one of the most accessible mediums to have ever been invented, short of the Internet itself. The information found there is (presumably) based on the most up-to-date resources available.

While I am waiting for the world to catch up to my ramblings, here are a few nursing-related lecture podcasts on iTunes U that I have subscribed to. I haven't watched them all, yet, but they're pretty much everything that I could find that was published from a School of Nursing. Please leave links to your favorite nursing podcasts in the comments and I'll update them here! Happy watching/listening :)

Acute Adult Nursing
Adult Health III
Clinical Skills for Student Child Health Nurses
College of Nursing Lectures - Video
Diabetes Care
NURS 083A: Pediatric Nursing
Nursing Informatics Program
Nursing Skills: Techniques for Sub Cutaneous and Intra Muscular Injections
Penn Nursing: Care to Change the World
Pharmacology for Future Nurses
Nursing-Psychology 342
The School of Nursing - Art of Bedside Care
The School of Nursing - NCLEX Review
Surgery ICU Rounds Podcast
Yale Health & Medicine