Evaluation of a Web-Based Course
“A Nurse’s Guide to Children’s Agricultural
Safety”: NAGCAT as Continuing Education for Nurses
Michele Schermann, Research Fellow
Ruth Rasmussen, Research Fellow
John Shutske, Professor
and Extension Agricultural Safety and Health Specialist
Objective
The purpose of this project was to find out if continuing
education web-based courses for nurses are effective. This
course is based on the North American Guidelines for Children’s
Agricultural Tasks (NAGCAT). NAGCAT was developed by an international
team of agricultural health and safety professionals, child
development experts, and farm families to help keep their
children safe while they are working on the farm.
The specific aims of the project were to:
- Examine the extent to which students like the course content,
- Find out if on-line learning is a method participants
enjoy, prefer, and would repeat again, and
- Measure participant beliefs that knowledge gained from
the course will be applicable in their practice.
Need or Impact
There is a need for continuing education for nurses working
with farm families. We believe rural nurses would use web-based
offerings for part of their continuing education requirements,
and we believe rural nurses would appreciate agriculturally-related
content that could help them in their practice. Evaluation
of courses in caring for farm families is necessary, particularly
if done on-line. Implications of this study suggest further
in-depth studies about knowledge retention of information
presented in this on-line course and frequency of use of such
knowledge in clinical practice.
Status
Sixty-five nurses completed the course and evaluation and
received 2.5 continuing education credits for re-licensure.
- 88.1% of participants found the website to be somewhat
to very easy to use.
- Most of the participants (88.1%) believed that knowledge
gained from the course would be useful in their practice.
- 92.5% of participants agree to strongly agree that our
course increased their awareness of child agricultural safety
and health.
- 95.3% of participants would take another web-based course
from us again.
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