Cardiac arrest is a major public health issue accounting for 15–20% of all deaths (1, 2). The initiation of optimal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) by health care providers could help more people to survive and recover from cardiac arrest(3).
The CPR is considered as an important procedure at which all health care providers, particularly the nurses, need to be skillful in this field (4). Since nurses are commonly first responders in hospital settings, they need to have sufficient knowledge and skills on CPR (5). Therefore, CPR training is an essential component of the undergraduate curriculum in different fields of healthcare disciplines to prepare students for their careers in the future (6). The literature review shows that improvements in CPR training could help students to improve their CPR knowledge and performance (7, 8).
Based on developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs), there is now a new perspective on learning and teaching methods (9). Recently, smartphone-based education has been recommended to be utilized in different areas of medical education (10, 11). It helps to provide a flexible and self-directed learning environment for users. Furthermore, learners could access the information and skills without any time and space constraints (12). The students may come under pressure when they learn and practice procedures in a classroom or skill lab. However, the provision of a safe and non-judgmental learning environment through smartphone-based education could help students to practice many times with no time constraint and concern with committing errors (11). The cost-effectiveness of using electronic technology in the delivery of health education has been also documented in the medical literature (13).
Todays, e-learning (learning utilizing electronic technologies) approaches and interactive multimedia are suggested for students' learning (14). For this, some capabilities of smartphones such as social media networks could be used for e-learning. Social media networks as an interactive smartphone-mediated facility can be used to share information between students, share ideas with other students, share personal academic interests, engage students in education and understand what they are thinking about during the education, create an effective study group, and enhance functions of e-textbooks through connecting students with social media for collaborative purposes (15).In fact, by using smartphone and social media networks, students can take more responsibility for their learning, learn in their own pace and in their own time, access a massive pool of knowledge, communicate and share their experiences and ideas with their teachers and peers in a format of articles, videos, picture, and so on; All of these activities could help them to improve their learning experiences (9).
According to the literature review, different teaching and methods have been proposed for developing of CPR skill among students in different fields of healthcare professionals. These methods include watch-and-practice technique (16), video training (17–19), CPR feedback device and manikin (20), simulation (3, 21), Automated audiovisual feedback (22), Peer-assisted Education(23), Virtual Simulation Game (7), Blending Teaching (24), and workshop(25).
Although there have been proposed many methods for CPR training, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study relating to the effect of social media training on CPR skills among student. Moreover, the efficacy of social media training has remained unknown as compared with other training methods. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the effect of social media education on CPR performance in nursing and midwifery students and to compare it with the workshop method.