NURS 8546 Week 3 Diffusion of Innovation Paper Example

Eleven People, Five Attributes: Applying Diffusion of Innovations to a Proposed Flipped Skills Course in an Associate Degree Nursing Program

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 8546: Strategies for Innovation in Nursing Education

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Eleven People, Five Attributes: Applying Diffusion of Innovations to a Proposed Flipped Skills Course in an Associate Degree Nursing Program

The Change and the Group

The program is considering moving its first-semester nursing skills course to a flipped arrangement. Learners would watch short recorded demonstrations and complete readings before laboratory sessions, and laboratory time, now spent largely on instructor demonstration, would be spent on supervised practice and skills checks. The proposal is driven by the placement loss: if learners reach clinical settings with stronger skills, fewer clinical hours are spent on basic tasks, which matters when clinical time is scarce.

Eleven faculty teach the skills course and its laboratory sections, five full-time and six adjunct. They are the people who would have to teach differently. This analysis applies Rogers's diffusion of innovations framework to that group (Rogers, 2003). It uses two parts of the framework: the adopter categories, which describe how people differ in their readiness to adopt, and the five attributes of an innovation that predict how quickly it is adopted.

Adopter Categories, Tied to What Can Be Seen

Rogers described five categories: innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority and laggards. Sorting colleagues into these categories by impression is easy and unhelpful, because the labels become judgments about people. This analysis instead ties each category to something observable in the program's records.

Innovators and early adopters were identified as faculty who already post recorded content for learners without being asked. Two full-time faculty have done so for more than a year. One of them recorded demonstrations of all twelve skills on her own time.

The early majority were identified as faculty who use the learning management system beyond posting the syllabus, for example for quizzes or discussion, but have not recorded content. Three full-time faculty and two adjuncts fit this description.

The late majority were identified as faculty whose teaching load leaves least room for preparation. The three adjuncts with the largest outside employment, and one full-time faculty member carrying two overload sections, fall here. Their position reflects time, not attitude. Research on how teachers experience change suggests that early concerns are usually about the self, such as time, skill and workload, and that concerns about the effect on learners come later, once the personal ones are answered (Hall & Hord, 2015). These four faculty are at the first stage.

Laggards, in Rogers's term, are those most attached to existing practice. One adjunct has taught the course the same way for fifteen years and has said in meetings that demonstration is how skills are learned. The analysis treats this as a view to be answered rather than a trait.

Tying categories to observables changes the strategy. The late majority are not unwilling; they are overloaded. A plan that offers them persuasion will fail where a plan that offers them time might work.

The Five Attributes Applied to the Change

Relative advantage. Rogers argued that an innovation spreads faster when people perceive it as better than what it replaces. The flipped course's advantage is argued here from the program's own pressure: with fewer clinical placements, every clinical hour spent teaching a learner to take a blood pressure is an hour lost from clinical reasoning. Faculty who supervise clinical groups have seen this directly, which makes the advantage visible to them in a way general claims about active learning are not.

Compatibility. The change must fit faculty's existing practices and values. The skills course currently requires faculty to grade weekly written assignments, which the group reports as its heaviest load. A flipped design that replaced some of that grading with in-lab skills checks would be compatible with faculty's wish to reduce grading. A design that added recorded content on top of existing grading would not.

Complexity. The change is complex, and this analysis concedes that rather than minimizing it. Recording demonstrations, building pre-laboratory quizzes and redesigning laboratory sessions require skills several faculty do not have, and the adjuncts would need to learn them on unpaid time unless the program pays for it.

Trialability. An innovation that can be tried on a small scale spreads more easily. The change can be trialed in one unit, such as medication administration, in one section, taught by the two early adopters, before the whole course moves. The trial would take one term and require recording three demonstrations.

Observability. This is the weakest attribute. The results of a flipped skills course appear mainly in clinical settings weeks later, where the faculty who taught the skills course rarely see them. Unless the program collects and shares evidence, such as first-attempt pass rates on skills checks and clinical instructors' reports, the advantage will be invisible to the faculty asked to adopt it. Reviews of flipped teaching in nursing education report mixed effects on learning outcomes (Betihavas et al., 2016), which makes local evidence all the more important.

What the Analysis Implies

The framework points to three actions. Start with a one-unit trial taught by the early adopters. Pay adjuncts for preparation time, since the late majority's barrier is time. And decide before the trial what evidence will be collected and shared, because observability is the attribute most likely to stall adoption. The framework does not say whether the flipped course will work. It says how likely this group is to adopt it, and what would make adoption faster.

Timing matters as well. The framework suggests that the early majority adopt after they have seen colleagues they trust succeed, not after they have been told the evidence. The trial should therefore end with the two early adopters showing their quiz reports and skills check results to the whole group, in a regular faculty meeting, before anyone is asked to change their own sections. The analysis also has limits. Rogers's categories were developed from studies of farmers, physicians and other adopters making individual choices; faculty teaching a shared course are not fully free to adopt or decline on their own, because the course must run in a consistent way across sections. The framework describes readiness well, but it says less about the moment when a course team must move together.

References

Betihavas, V., Bridgman, H., Kornhaber, R., & Cross, M. (2016). The evidence for "flipping out": A systematic review of the flipped classroom in nursing education. Nurse Education Today, 38, 15-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2015.12.010

Hall, G. E., & Hord, S. M. (2015). Implementing change: Patterns, principles, and potholes (4th ed.). Pearson.

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). Free Press.