Five developing authors, thirteen contributors, thirty-two national peer reviewers, and an advisory committee collaboratively created the Nursing Pharmacology textbook under the leadership of the CVTC Open RN team. In addition to including current, evidence-based content, online learning activities have also been incorporated into the textbook that encourage students to apply content and make clinical judgments typically required during patient care. Since the book was published in June 2020, there are over 8000 international users of the free e-book and over 300 downloads of the pdf version by over 200 colleges and universities. The textbook has also been uploaded to LibreTexts for easy remixing by faculty, and an affordable print version is available to students in college bookstores and on Amazon.
In addition to creating the Nursing Pharmacology textbook, the Open RN team responded to the COVID-19 crisis by uploading over 120 OER nursing simulation videos to the Open RN YouTube channel. These videos were created previously by the ARISE grant project led by CVTC, and many have already been remixed into new online OER learning activities aligned with the Open RN textbooks. Now that they are available on YouTube with CC-BY licensing, faculty anywhere can remix these simulation videos into remote learning activities substituted for clinical courses affected by COVID closures. To date, there are 82 Open RN YouTube channel subscribers and almost 18,000 views of the OER simulation videos.
The Open RN team is currently developing two additional textbooks, Nursing Skills and Nursing Fundamentals, that will be published in Summer 2021. The final two textbooks, Nursing Mental Health and Nursing Management, are slated for publication in Summer 2022. For more information about the project, go to the Open RN webpage.
