Preparing students to be ready for practice: An innovative approach to teaching advanced physical assessment skills online

Distance graduate nursing education has been expanding. Although many didactic courses are taught through an online platform, there are often challenges to providing skill-based courses, such as advanced physical assessment, through an online format. To prepare and assess advanced practice nursing students on their clinical knowledge and physical assessment skills, an online course was developed using multisource feedback and videography. Students used videography to record themselves as they conducted physical assessments on a volunteer patient. Students then critiqued their own video, critiqued two of their colleagues' videos, and the final critiques of the videos were conducted by faculty. All students were expected to perform and pass a complete physical examination on a standardize patient as their final examination. The final scores of the students learning through the online course were equivalent to the scores achieved by the students in the traditional face-to-face physical assessment course.