Khan Academy Style Videos in Nursing Education

According to the cognitive theory of multimedia learning our working memory contains two channels including an audio / textual channel, and a visual channel (Mayer, 2005). Each channel has limited capacity and people learn best when both channels are stimulated simultaneously with integrated audio and visual. Khan (2012) developed a unique method of screencast videos in which he draws diagrams while explaining a concept, similar to how a teacher would draws images on a chalkboard during a lecture. With over 280 million views, Khan’s YouTube videos have become very popular with students, and are used by teachers around the world to supplement classroom learning. These Khan academy style videos have been utilized in an online physiology and pathophysiology course for nurse practitioner students. Short videos were created using a microphone, Bamboo drawing tablet, SmoothDraw software, and Screencast-o-matic software.  The total cost of these products was around $210, and the technique took about 3 hours to learn.  Each video was less than 10 minutes long and focused on explaining one single concept. Each weekly session of the course included a series of 10-12 videos embedded in the Blackboard learning management system, with each video followed by a short ungraded quiz to test comprehension and provide formative feedback. The course evaluation results indicated that the students were highly satisfied with the course.  Furthermore, the students expressed that they preferred these videos to voice-over-PowerPoint lectures.  In fact, the students indicated that the videos were the most helpful in learning fundamental concepts and making connections between concepts and clinical practice compared to other resources including textbook, on-line articles, and written assignments. The videos were published to YouTube, and have become very popular, generating over 1 million views in 16 months. This evidence suggests that Khan-Academy-Style Videos may be a useful tool for nursing educators.