Comparison of Virtual Education Challenges in Nursing Before and After COVID-19; A Systematic Review

Introduction: The Covid-19 epidemic is the biggest challenge facing education systems in the world to date. Medical Sciences Universities took students out of educational and clinical settings and led them to virtual education. This sudden transition was accompanied by many challenges, especially in practical profession such as nursing. Methods: The present study is a systematic review and is based on Persian and English articles extracted from Iranian (SID, IranDoc) and foreign databases (PubMed, Science Direct, Scopus, Google Scholar) using the keywords virtual learning, virtual education, e-learning, Web-based learning, online learning, virtual reality simulation, coronavirus, Covid-19, Nursing and other related keywords, from 2013-2020 were used and reviewed. Inclusion criteria included qualitative, quantitative and combined studies, which faced Barriers and challenges in using various types of virtual learning and scored an acceptable score in Gifford Quality Assessment. A variety of review studies were excluded. Results: from 404 related articles, 44 qualified articles (42 English and 2 Persian) were reviewed. The results show the challenges of virtual education before and after Corona in 3 categories: infra-structures of virtual education; virtual training and evaluation process; ethics and information security. Conclusions: Preparation in human and equipment dimensions requires precise planning. Now is a good time to turn the current threatening situation into an opportunity and take a big step towards developing education systems by strengthening the needful structures and technologies, reforming the education and evaluation process and training professors, students.