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Faculty Involvement and Administrative Support Are Keys to Delivering Graduate Nursing Programs Online

Goals

In 1997, Associate Professor Melissa Avery had students in her graduate nursing classes who were commuting to the Twin Cities campus from as far away as South Dakota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Because of a continuing national shortage of health care providers in rural areas and barriers to obtaining graduate education, a new solution was needed. The University of Minnesota School of Nursing had previously delivered programs to Moorhead, Duluth, and Rochester via interactive television (ITV), but students still had to drive to participate. Avery and some of her colleagues thought, "Surely there is an easier way to increase access to our graduate programs without being bound by time and place."

Outcomes

Since then, School of Nursing administrators, faculty members, and staff members have been able to use online technology to effect programmatic and wider changes. They redesigned three graduate nursing specialty areas and all their related disciplinary core courses for online delivery, and two more programs are in process. An evaluation instrument has been developed, in partnership with the Digital Media Center (DMC), and used to assess 16 of the online graduate courses; it is now being used as a model in the College of Education and Human Development. A WebVista template has been developed for all online and face-to-face courses that are supported by a Web presence, and almost all nursing undergraduate and graduate courses have some sort of online presence. A CD course development guide and collection of customizable online activity prototypes is about to be pilot tested. How did they accomplish so much?

Support Strategies

Avery credits expanding faculty involvement coupled with "a tremendous amount of administrative support." In 1997, with funds from a University of Minnesota Distance Education Council grant and support from the DMC, she and five colleagues began exploring the educational uses of online technology. During the next years, more nursing instructors received support from both local and national sources, and were able to expand their online teaching efforts until, according to Avery, "it's become part of our culture."

For example, the school was awarded funds from Senior Vice President for Health Sciences (Academic Health Center) Frank Cerra in 2000 to redesign the graduate disciplinary core courses for online delivery. Two three-year grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Health Services and Resources Administration, one in 2000 and the other in 2004, provided support for redesigning other specialty courses. Several faculty members received funding and support through the University's TEL Grant Program and the DMC Faculty Fellowship Program. Some worked with DMC consultants to develop and implement the online course evaluation instrument. Several graduate TAs received training through the OIT TA Web Certification Program. In addition, when a nursing faculty subcommittee recommended having a Web presence for all their courses as long as staff support was available, representatives from the school worked with DMC consultants to make the TA program available through the school. According to Avery, "The associate dean went to that course herself as well as the staff. Now staff are actually helping faculty get their course materials up on the Web. ItŐs basically now part of their job description. We couldnŐt have done that without the administrative support."

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Last modified Tuesday, 19-Jun-2007 15:32:49 CDT