Facilitating decision making in authentic contexts: an SVVR-based experiential flipped learning approach for professional training

Facilitating decision making in authentic contexts is an important educational objective of professional training. To enable learners to have more opportunities to practice in authentic contexts under the guidance of instructors, the flipped learning mode of shifting the lectures to be the pre-class activity with the presentation of digital media has gradually been receiving attention. However, the conventional flipped learning mostly uses videos to present teaching content. In such a learning environment with one-way information and lack of experience, it is not easy for most learners to experience the actual situation encountered in the nursing procedure, which affects their judgment and performance when dealing with actual scenarios. To solve this problem, the present study adopted spherical video-based virtual reality (SVVR) to provide an experiential learning mode in flipped learning. To verify the effects of this teaching mode, this study conducted an experiment in a blood transfusion safety training course. The experimental group used the SVVR-based experiential flipped learning (SVVR-EFL) mode, while the control group used the conventional flipped learning mode. The results showed that using the SVVR-EFL mode not only enhanced new nursing staff’s learning achievement, but also increased their decision-making performance, meta-cognition tendency, problem-solving tendency and classroom engagement.