Changes in population demographics, technological advancements, and the increased communicable and non-communicable diseases, have resulted in the need for changing the healthcare delivery system(1). The uncertain nature of the health environment requires professional health care providers with immense clinical meta-competencies to rapidly address and manage the situation. However, owing to the shortage of competent and experienced professional nurses, the healthcare system is forced to hire newly graduated nurses by hoping that, they have achieved a maximum level of clinical meta-competencies to function independently, in delivering quality and cost-effective care among people (2).
Motivation is essential to learning to enhance the individuals’ education, whereas important attention has been to be paid to nursing education to deliver quality and cost-effective care in contemporary society. Motivating nursing students to learn is an essential component to ensure competent graduates can exhibit safe, ethical, and legal practice as the backbone and critical issues in nursing education (3). The revised portions of literature disclose that students’ motivation in nursing is obsessed by asking the reason for doing a thing that can drive students to study as the associated external stimuli. There has been a reported louder volume that, clinical learning environment triggers nursing students dogging in their clinical rotation due to the mismatch between theoretical and clinical practice, which are associated with a limited number of clinical instructors that might smoothen the learning environment as the major eagles as the extrinsic motivation among nursing students
On the other hand, motivation in clinical teaching has been experienced to be outdated due to various models of clinical monitoring strategies that are not smooth among nursing students (4). Based on the quality of nursing program delivery, and the ability of nurse students to meet the required clinical learning outcomes, motivation to learn plays a crucial component surrounding the lack of interest exhibited by some nursing students, to adhere to their clinical placements(5). According to (6) attendance by nursing students has been reported by various previous studies to be a prevailing problem. The situation provides insight into whether the existing monitoring system does not work effectively, in motivating nursing students to attend their clinical learning sessions.
Absenteeism during classroom and clinical sessions becomes an important aspect to be looked at the emerges, when addressing the issue of motivation among nursing students (7). Of interest to note, a limited number of previous studies have been published that examined clinical absenteeism as an indicator of students’ motivation to attend clinical tutorials and practicals. As found by (8), the clinical environment plays an integral part in the academic achievements of nursing students. Their findings reveal that nursing students learning motivation were positively correlated with an improved and well-organized clinical learning environment. It was recommended that through their study that, the clinical learning environment needs to be qualified to foster motivation among nursing students.
In the same way, (9) noted in their study finding that, majority of nursing students lack clinical learning motivation during their clinical practice because the clinical learning environment does not motivate them to learn. They argued that a favorable clinical environment for nurses’ students needed a continuous innovative collaboration model among institutional staff, academic faculty, clinical instructors’ skill to mentor, with adequate medical supplies and equipment, which tally with the number of students and their needs.
Moreover, it has been demonstrated by Nasri et al., (10) that clinical environments are the most significant blockades to be considered in nursing education that are counted as the external factors for the student's lack of motivation and interest. It also forms the students’ major parts of clinical teaching and supervision as the positive or the negative influence counted the educational perception among nursing students.
All the same, owing to the shortage of competent and experienced mentors and an unfriendly clinical environment, the authentic clinical learning environment will continue to be low (11). Contrariwise, clinical mentoring, support, monitoring supervision, and evaluation embedded in multimedia-assisted approaches such as the use of mobile phones and computers, promises to enable learning motivation in their clinical placement(12).
Mobile phone usage has been recently adopted in most health programs and interventions in low and middle-income countries. The majority of people in Tanzania for example, own mobile phones including students in high learning education. However, designing and an authentic clinical environment using an interactive web-based clinical practice monitoring system, is often limited in Tanzania by the availability of the published literature, inadequately trained mentors who are proportional to a large number of enrolled nursing students (13).
Worth noting, the use of technology in the form of Web-based learning (WBL) is widely used as a sustainable and vital instructional tool in nursing education. The system offers academic potentials by enhancing academic motivation among nursing students to improve clinical competence. Despite its popularity, classroom motivation has been discussed in many studies but scholarly works on clinical learning motivation content are limited in Tanzania. Little has been demonstrated on its application and use in the Tanzanian nursing education system. Therefore, this study intended to explore the baseline information regarding clinical learning motivation among nursing students in Tanzania.