Abstract
Service learning is a well-established method of learning and common in pre-professional healthcare programs. The benefits of service learning include expanding students’ strengths in both academic and professional skills (Stewart & Wubbena, 2014). In recent years, opportunities for expansive student service learning within our respiratory therapy program have diminished, with barriers being availability of time, resources, and clinical partners. Online learning is a ready consideration to enhance lessons that lack a performance context, and methods tested and refined during the recent pandemic highlight students’ ability to develop skills from service learning via online delivery (Ngai, et.al., 2024). A need for online service-learning opportunities arose from a clinical partner canceling scheduled service-learning rotations for USI respiratory therapy senior students shortly before the beginning of the Fall 2024 semester. Program faculty elected to keep the service-learning rotations on the schedule and created individual online modules for each senior with the purpose of connecting students with the basis of service learning—actively joining academic learning with aiding a specific community (Goertzen, et.al., 2019)—with activities in a specific, formatted organization. Using guidance from the preparation phase of the four components of service learning (Goertzen, et.al., 2019), the modules contained short videos to introduce a specific problem among members of a medically underserved community, guided activities in academic literature to examine scope and impact on that community, interactive maps to identify the demographics of these community members, and video interviews and reports on active research and solutions. Students completed the modules by reading the clinical history and current state of a fictional patient in the community of focus, then creating an action plan to assist the individual. While each student’s module included a different community of focus, each was constructed in identical sequence, using written, audio, and visual resources to appeal to various learning styles, and completed on campus with access to instructors for questions and clarifications. Each student participated in an individual debrief with an instructor after completing their assigned module. The challenges in creating the modules were the possibility of creating duplicate content that students had seen before in previous courses outside of the respiratory therapy program and obtaining detailed feedback on the project’s impact on the students. Lessons learned included the need to gauge students’ interest and previous exposure to specific sub-categories prior to entering the module, create a group debrief post-project conclusion, and work for a sustainable format for disseminating project information. The purpose of the poster presentation is to describe the method used to create the modules, discuss the evidence used to choose the material and delivery of the resources, provide examples for faculty wishing to incorporate similar methods, and examine future opportunities.