The virtual clinical evaluation tool

Two years ago, faculty and students at this rural university setting collaborated to implement a virtual clinical evaluation tool. In recognition of the frustrations involved in coordinating instructor and student input to a hard copy tool, a virtual clinical evaluation tool was created in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. Excel documents have the advantage of immediate retrieval and use by instructors or students, ease of narration by word processing, automatic mathematical computation of formative and summative scores, and data storage through computer archives. Using the online Blackboard course, students and instructors are able to collaboratively input a Likert score for each posted evaluation outcome and word process-related comments about students' clinical performance. An overview of the 2-year implementation of this virtual clinical evaluation tool, as well as the evaluation process, is discussed.