Nursing education in crisis: a computer alternative.

The impact of computer-assisted instruction upon the educational process is having its effect. The computer is being used in nursing education today to manage the educational environment, to instruct, to evaluate, to identify problem areas, to gather data, to manipulate data for research purposes and for continued education. As we struggle in our efforts for quality individualized education, we are minutely scrutinizing every aspect of the teaching learning process. We are not only examining how we teach but what we teach and why we are teaching it! Our deeper understanding of the process of education has helped us to delineate nursing process as content. Higher levels of instructional goals -- cognitive, affective and conative -- are resulting in education of the whole individual. The systematization of the learning process with the greater ease of accountability is leading nursing education to blaze promising new trails into the twenty-first century.