How Ready are the Public Nursing Colleges to Implement Online Teaching and Learning? A Feasibility Study

The purpose of this study was to develop a conceptual teaching and learning model that will integrate nursing theory and practice by using social media platforms. The research setting was the three public nursing colleges that offer a basic nursing programme in the Gauteng province, South Africa. We used a qualitative, phenomenological and descriptive approach to obtain the participants’ in-depth thoughts and opinions regarding the feasibility of implementing social media platforms for student nurses’ teaching and learning. A sentiment analysis system, which is a smart service for data analysis and visualisation to discover patterns and meaning in collected data, was used to implement a coding process. Themes and categories were developed and major qualitative findings were summarised. The participants supported the use of social media, with consideration of access to resources, availability of training workshops, interaction between lecturers and students, numerous teaching strategies and rules, and regulations and policies to govern the system. Preferred social media platforms were WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook and Skype, which could be accessed easily by all students and lecturers. We developed a conceptual teaching and learning model using social media platforms, which will integrate nursing theory and practice. We made recommendations to promote training workshops on the use of numerous teaching strategies and the development of policies, rules and regulations to guide the interactions of student nurses and lecturers when using social media platforms in teaching and learning.