Effectiveness of the small private online course‐based flipped teaching program for enhancing nursing students’ self-directed learning ability in the Surgical Nursing course: A practical study

Small private online course-based flipped teaching is an innovative hybrid instructional approach that merges online and offline activities, fostering autonomous learning among students prior to class and facilitating the assimilation of knowledge within the confines of the classroom. To determine the effectiveness of the small private online course-based flipped teaching model on undergraduate nursing students' self-directed learning abilities, we performed a practice version of the small private online course-based flipped teaching program as a quasi-experiment, specifically designed for the Surgical Nursing course and assessed its effectiveness in students' self-directed learning abilities. To this end, a total of 264 students from the 2019 nursing major cohort were selected. Three classes comprising 131 students were randomly selected as the experimental group, and three other classes, comprising 133 students, were set as the control group. The results revealed no significant differences in the scores of self-directed learning abilities between the experimental and control groups before the experiment. After the experiment, the average scores on each dimension of the self-directed learning abilities improved significantly, and the final score of the experimental group was higher than that of the control group. The small private online course-based flipped teaching model can promote undergraduate nursing students' self-directed learning abilities, owing to its practicality and feasibility for the selected course.