Exploring student perceptions of virtual simulation versus traditional clinical and manikin-based simulation

The COVID-19 pandemic immediately changed the way nursing programs provide clinical experiences for pre-licensure nursing programs. Healthcare organizations closed access to clinical experiences for nursing students and universities immediately shifted to remote learning and online virtual simulation.

This research examined students' perceptions of virtual simulation in meeting their learning needs when compared to traditional clinical experiences and manikin-based simulation environments.

A retrospective multi-site exploratory, descriptive design had 97 participants complete the Clinical Learning Environment Comparison Survey 2.0 after having experienced virtual simulation. A Kruskal-Wallis test was used to examine differences among participants when grouped by degree program and level/term within the nursing program.

Traditional clinical experiences met students' perceived learning needs for all degree programs of study for subscale items of communication, nursing process, holism, critical thinking, and self-efficacy. When grouped by level/term, traditional clinical experiences met all students' perceived learning needs for every subscale item. Manikin-based simulation met students' perceived learning needs for subscale items of critical thinking and teaching-learning dyad while virtual simulation met perceived learning needs for subscale items of nursing process, critical thinking, self-efficacy, and teaching-learning dyad.

While traditional clinical learning experiences remains the "gold standard", manikin-based and virtual simulation do meet specific important learning needs.