Post from Kyle Slinn, RN – Khan Academy Nursing Fellow
The winners from the NCLEX-RN competition are in the San Francisco Bay area this week participating in a training camp hosted by Khan Academy! They’re here to work with each other, and with Dr. Rishi Desai and me on improving their video making and question writing skills.
This training camp is no walk in the park though. We’re keeping them busy this week with a packed schedule. We began the training camp Monday at 7:00am and started out with some communication games and activities. After breakfast and a short online meeting with Karen Kesten from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the winners spent a few hours discussing video editing and NCLEX-RN style question writing best practices. For videos, we broke down the qualities of a good video into 6 fundamental pillars: Content objectivity and accuracy, voice presentation, visual presentation, audience engagement, video pacing, and technical clarity/issues.
Next we analyzed video clips! We chose some from Bill Nye The Science Guy episodes and selected some from existing Khan Academy videos to tease out what works well. Seeing a great teacher break down a complex concept into easy to understand explanations, is a thing of beauty. This was a lot of fun and prompted great discussion.
After a quick break we made ourselves lunch and broke up into two groups where the winners gave one another feedback on the videos they had created themselves. It was so great to see everyone working together and providing such great constructive criticism and ideas. For example one person thought that it would be useful to draw the heart on its side to get a better view of the blood vessels coming off of it. Another person wanted to get ideas for a helpful analogy to explain the coagulation cascade. In terms of feedback, the most common concerns were related to presentation style – an area that we will be focusing on over the week.
After lunch everyone worked on their videos and questions, trying to incorporate the feedback they had received. Rishi and I met with the winners individually to give feedback on the videos, and questions, and then we finally finished off the night with Thai takeout and casual conversation.
It was a busy first day, and a prelude to the week ahead. The neat thing is that you can already see the creative juices flowing, and the friendships beginning to build. Last summer we held a similar training camp for our MCAT winners and you can see all the content they’ve made here!