Online Registry Review vs. Live Registry Review Seminars – PART II

Most aspiring healthcare professionals have already spent nearly 200 hours of in-class time, probably twice that amount in study, 12 months of clinical supervision, and often over $20,000 in tuition costs just to achieve the prerequisites to sit for a certification exam. Yet despite all that time, effort and expense, you NEED credentialing to advance in your career.

The primary purpose of a registry review course, therefore, is to protect what you have already invested. With that in mind, the effectiveness of a Live versus Online review course is no mere abstraction.  There is really only one benchmark that matters, and that is a successful outcome in your credentialing exam.

The previous discussion outlined many advantages associated with online registry review, most notably CONVENIENCE, COST and RETENTION. Today, I wanted to continue by outlining how online education ‘blends’ and supplements your prior in-class studies.

ITERATIVE LEARNING – I briefly touched on this concept in discussing improved retention with online learning modules. I bring it up again, because an inherent weakness of live reviews is its “one and done” structure. Especially with math and science, repetition truly solidifies your familiarity, understanding and confidence in problem-solving.

It is rare for anyone to grasp a concept on their first run through its explanation; that is just not how the human brain works.  The creation and strengthening of synapses requires multiple days with repetition to solidify memory and recall.  So because of this, the ability to review, and re-review a module represents a decisive advantage as you work to reconstruct memories from 12-18 months of previous classroom education.

ATTENTION SPAN / ACUITY – Studies have consistently shown that students tend to lose focus as the length of a lecture progresses.  It is normal to maintain acute focus on a topic for no more than 25 to 30 minutes at a time.  Sadly, this works against attendees of live review seminars. Aside from mastering superior note-taking skills, there were no better options before the development of digital eCourse platforms.

While I emphasize that the ability to remain focused for long periods of time is a skill worth developing, and critical to your success in a testing environment, it is comforting to have the option to break a lecture into more digestible blocks.

REFINEMENT – There are two aspects of well-constructed online review courses worth mentioning here. Firstly, course development and content presentation have been constructed and enhanced over many years. Just as with a well-rehearsed Broadway play or Hollywood movie, you receive the benefit of many behind-the-scenes refinements. As referenced previously, dry voiceovers of Powerpoint slides, or rolling continuous video of a live lecture does not represent the best face of online learning technology.

As a supplement to previous in-class study, however, the ability to skip around and outside the linear structure of a course lecture review makes each experience truly customized. Moreover, it allows the viewer to condense their study time toward the exact subject matter that needs refreshment.

My closing thoughts are a reminder from a previous blog post concerning strategies for successful credentialing exam results: Frequently, the difference between passing and failing comes down to only 6-8 more correct responses in a 110-160 question test. For a registry review course to “deliver the goods”, you want to leverage the delivery platform that provides you with the most intrinsic advantages to reach that decisive score.