Emotional Response and Coping Strategies in Nursing Education

COVID-19 has caused various emotional responses from nursing students and their nurse educators. For nurse students, just as is the case with the general population, the pandemic has caused major psychological issues. The associated psychological stress, according to Huang et al. (2020), has affected learners’ ability to grasp the necessary skills and knowledge. According to Bloom’s learning domains, the affective domain is essential in the overall outcome of student learning. The learning environment for nursing students and the work environment for nurse practitioners is the same, which means that they are subjected to almost similar stressing factors.

Limited Educational Human Recourse

The disease has impacted the psychological and mental health of nurse educators. More importantly, since people are generally required to self-isolate whenever they contract the virus, nurse educators who fall sick are forced to suspend learning, much to the students’ disadvantage (Huang et al., 2020). In the process, the nursing students in the practicum must survive with reduced numbers of educators and instructors (Chen et al., 2020). This has negatively impacted the quality of education that they get (Al Thobaity & Alshammari, 2020).

Poor Communication Between Educators and Learners

The pandemic has forced distant learning on health institutions. Therefore, the mechanisms of communication have switched to email and learning portals as opposed to face-to-face and memos that were initially utilized. Proper communication is key to effective learning. Instructors communicating through learning portals are more likely to miss the attention of the audience, the learners. This has impacted the efficiency of distant online learning (Baticulon et al., 2020). Among other barriers to learning reported by Baticulon et al. (2020) include poor communication.

Domestic Implications

Learners pursuing distant learning involving e-learning have had a rough time balancing between domestic activities and academic work. There has been limited attention to academic assignments and learning. This has made it difficult to implement student-based interventions in promoting student learning (Dewart et al., 2020) an aspect that further complicates the distant learning process

Positive Impacts of COVID-19 on Education

Despite the extensive negative impacts the pandemic has had on different sectors, is not devoid of positive implications for the field of education and health. There are few subspecialties in the field of education where COVID-19 has promoted a positive situation. The need for digitalization of learning and the provision of remote healthcare services has resulted in expanded technology adoption.

Digitization of Education

Most learning institutions across the world have adopted online learning. Online learning has digitized requirements that have to put in place before learning starts. Digitized learning has provided numerous advantages in places where the learning institution ensured efficient and successful establishment of the required resources to both students and the educators. Further, online learning makes it easy for students and educators to share resources, a factor that can potentially widen a learner’s scope of knowledge. Further, to support online learning, new tools and software applications have emerged that promote teleconferencing, thereby ensuring effective distant learning. Software applications such as Zoom and Google Meet have promoted online learning by enabling real-time learning sessions.

Additionally, in a bid to control the spread of the disease, most governments across the globe focused on enhancing public awareness by promoting patient education through public health teaching. The media teachings about hygiene and proper disease prevention, particularly regarding how the virus spreads, has added to the existing public knowledge on disease management and prevention. These teachings have enlightened patients about health components that nursing and medical students would have spent educating the patients about.

Research and Learning

COVID-19 has provided a fertile ground for research on viral communicable respiratory diseases. Various health and educational resources have been published about this pandemic that can widen the learner’s knowledge of this disease. Arguably, research studies