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

BACKGROUND: 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. PURPOSE: This research examined students' perceptions of virtual simulation in meeting their learning needs when compared to traditional clinical experiences and manikin-based simulation environments. METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSION: While traditional clinical learning experiences remains the “gold standard”, manikin-based and virtual simulation do meet specific important learning needs.