Blended Learning and Its Effectiveness in Nursing Education: Review

Using a teaching model is not affective enough to advance learning alone. A compilation of the educational and teaching models should be used to create active learning courses and thinking in learners. In addition, blended learning is a new approach to the instructional designthat is defined as applying more than one method, strategy, technique, or media in education. Hence, the purpose of this review was to present topics related to the subject of blended learning with an emphasis on nursing education. This study was a review that required content for writing it was obtained from searching databases PubMed, Science Direct, SID, IranMedex, and Magiran. The applied keywords included blended, integrated, teaching, learning, and nursing separately and in combination. 80 documentary content were published  in 2000 to 2017 related to blended learning were selected and evaluated, then only 20 related papers were used. After reviewing the relevant literature about blended learning, issues such as objectives, benefits, and challenges of blended learning have been discussed in medicine, especially nursing education. Using the strategy of blended educational programs was supported by plenty of these studies. The evidence indicated that these methods increase students' knowledge and skills. Blended learning has been preferred over traditional training methods, therefore, it will provide the possibility of realizing deep and active learning by considering the benefits of traditional training methods along with other new methods.