Adapting a Classroom Simulation Experience to an Online Escape Room in Nutrition Education

Jenifer Ross,Andrea Arikawa,Lauri Wright

doi:10.24059/olj.v25i1.2469

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 emergency transition to remote learning, an undergraduate class in nutrition and dietetics modified a face-to-face experiential “escape room” assignment into a comparable online experience. The online assignment was structured so that students had to use knowledge and clues to move through each step of the Nutrition Care Process; students proceeded through the escape room individually until each successfully “escaped.” An important component of this assignment was the postactivity debriefing process, which took place via video conferencing in small groups. Students indicated that they were pleasantly surprised at the effectiveness of the online assignment. However, analytics showed that students progressed through most of the steps fairly quickly; thus, instructors plan to improve future deployments by using a variety of interactive assessments and adding more layered criteria and clues within each of the escape room steps.

Highlights

Due to the COVID-19 emergency transition to remote learning, an undergraduate class in nutrition and dietetics modified a face-to-face experiential “escape room” assignment into a comparable online experience
We focus on an undergraduate class in a nutrition and dietetics program at a public university in the southeast U.S The nutrition and dietetics program offers both oncampus and online courses, 67% of courses are only offered in a face-to-face format
The assignment required students to use knowledge and clues to move through each step of the Nutrition Care Process (NCP), a systematic approach to providing high-quality nutrition care that emphasizes critical thinking, problem-solving, and decisionmaking (Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 2020)

Summary

Introduction

Due to the COVID-19 emergency transition to remote learning, an undergraduate class in nutrition and dietetics modified a face-to-face experiential “escape room” assignment into a comparable online experience. Step 7 included a video of a swallow study being performed (Figure 1) to help students identify the appropriate intervention based on the patient’s progress.

Results

Conclusion