ID: 32982
This project reimagines open educational practice in junior-level nursing education by integrating open pedagogy, transparent AI use, and public-facing knowledge sharing to address real-world barriers to equitable health care. Embedded in an undergraduate Chronic Care course, nursing students engage with open educational resources (OERs) focused on special populations in public health, including faith traditions and spiritual worldviews, as well as stateless, displaced, refugee, asylum-seeking, and immigrant populations. The OER content provides students with a structured, accessible introduction to how culture, belief systems, migration histories, legal status, trauma exposure, and structural barriers can shape health behaviors, trust, access to care, and the continuity of care.Rather than presenting populations as fixed categories, the OER emphasizes complexity, intersectionality, and the limitations of labels. Students are encouraged to move beyond assumptions and instead approach care through cultural humility, trauma-informed practice, and patient-centered communication. The content introduces practical strategies for asking respectful questions, assessing barriers to care, using interpreters appropriately, and aligning care plans with patient values and priorities when clinically safe to do so. In this way, the OER serves not only as informational content, but also as a framework for helping students think more critically and compassionately about the lived realities that influence chronic illness management.Students then select one population focus and apply that learning to develop an evidence-based safety bundle for the management of a chronic condition covered in the course. Using AI transparently as a co-creator rather than a ghostwriter, students are supported in shaping and refining their bundles while remaining responsible for the clinical reasoning and final product. The assignment requires students to connect population-specific considerations to concrete nursing care and to translate broader public health and social context concepts into practical, patient-centered interventions. Each bundle includes evidence-based interventions, culturally responsive patient education, attention to faith and spirituality considerations or legal status and migration-related stressors, and SMART goals to support safe, individualized care planning. In doing so, students deepen their understanding of how inclusive care planning can improve safety, communication, adherence, and continuity in chronic disease management.Students then share their work as a “living poster,” creating an open-access learning resource that classmates can use and build upon. This public-facing component extends the assignment beyond individual course completion and positions students as contributors to a shared knowledge commons. By combining OER content, applied bundle design, and ethical AI-supported learning, this project demonstrates how open educational practices can foster deeper understanding, strengthen clinical judgment, and generate practical, practice-ready resources for the public good.
Speakers 
From Classroom to Community: Open Pedagogy for Inclusive Care, Virginia Commonwealth University
Andrea Reed is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she teaches in the undergraduate nursing program, and is part of the National League of Nursing Social Determinants of Health 2026 Leadership Cohort. Andrea co-leads the VCU Institute for Women’s...
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Friday October 9, 2026 4:15pm - 4:30pm
EDT
Video
