She also is better able to keep track of students’ progress and
engagement, she said. “In an online course, you can’t sit in the back of the room and hide. If somebody’s not participating, I know right away.”
Online school tools transfer to real life Matt Becka,MSN,RN, chose the onlineMSNleadership program at TexasA&Mnot just because it allowed him to keep working full time as anEDnurse and eventually take a job in another city while he went to school. Becka wanted to become comfortable with the tools and skills of online communication, from Web conferences to computer-based scheduling to proper email etiquette. Learning to work remotely “to me was a necessity,” said Becka, speaking from his office in London where he works as the senior clinical manager for Teleflex, an international medical device company. Becka communicates regularly with colleagues and clients in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. “There’s only so much busi- ness now that’s done face to face,” he said. “A significant part of your day is spent behind a computer screen.” Becka’s experience at Texas A&Mhas helped himgreatly in his
job, he said. But he thinks experience in connecting with people online is important to many nursing jobs, whether supervising employees on different hospital campuses or using telehealth to see patients. Among other things, online education taught him to appreciate the nuances of written communication, he said. “Some people can be very direct and not realize that regardless of what you’re saying, there’s a tone associated with it.”He learned to re-read his own emails before sending them, asking, “What’s the worst way someone could take this?” Paula Nersesian, MPH, RN, is in a traditional nursing PhD
program at Johns Hopkins and also took a nurse educator cer- tificate program online there. The diversity of students from across the country in the online program impressed her. Some taught in schools of nursing, others were educators in hospitals or clinicians working on a DNP. The wide range of experience and settings benefited peer reviews of projects and papers, she said. For instance, one of her fellow online students who worked in a hospital produced a staff development training session on contraception and sickle-cell disease that was completely different from her own project—a lecture to PhD students on a topic in genetics. “I thought it was a productive exchange, seeing how she applied her project in a (clinical) practice setting.” But Nersesian wouldn’t want to do her PhD entirely online.
Complex discussions on ethics and clinical theory that she has had in the classroomwould be difficult to replicatewith an asyn- chronous online message board, she said. “You can’t respond as quickly. There’s less back and forth. But you might accomplish that in a synchronous meeting of students online,” such as on a conferencing site. One drawback to an online program, Nersesian said, is the
time spent getting the technology to work properly—having a strong Internet connection, connecting to a VPN, remembering various passwords. A programmightwork on a desktop or laptop device but not a mobile one, or a connection speed might not be fast enough to run certain programs on all devices. “It’s a lot more time spent interfacing with electronic devices,” she said.
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Though they are sometimes seen asways for universities to save
money, online classes require high-quality design and instruction to stay up to professional standards, nursing instructors said. Classes need to stay small to allow instructors to communicate with students, said Anne E. Belcher, PhD, RN, ANEF, FAAN, associate professor and director of the office for teaching excel- lence at the Johns Hopkins University School ofNursing. Good instructional designers are critical to having quality online content, she said.Whether online or face to face, “we’re very careful to have all the courses look alike, with the same syllabus and content.” “Capping the number of students is a huge thing” in a good
DNP program, DiNapoli said. She would be concerned about an online program with 100 students in a class. The one-on- one relationship with an instructor would be difficult, she said. “Universities need to take into consideration all of the resources they have” when offering online programs. Instructional designers at Johns Hopkins constantly look for
new technology that allows students and instructors to better interact, such as VoiceThread,which allows participants to record their voices for presentations or discussions, Belcher said. Her program, at students’ request, is also looking at Jing, a screen-casting technology that allows instructors to comment verbally on online student papers. “They hear the feeling in our voices,” she said. “I can say what I’m concerned about or pleased about more easily than I can in writing.” Some programs require
more in-person time than others. Johns Hopkins’ DNP programrequires students to spend a week on campus three times a year for the first year and once during the second, Belcher said, though other graduate nursing programs are completely online. At Duquesne, PhD students travel to the campus for a weeklong orientation, and most return again to defend their dissertations, which are recorded and streamed onto the Internet so fellow students can watch and ask questions in real time, Goodfellow said. Though they don’t believe online learning will ever completely
replace the traditional classroom, online instructors say it is another important way to provide higher education to those who want it, and will increase along with the demand for education. “It is a different way of learning than when I started out,” Bray said. “I don’t think either one of themis better. I think it’s what fits the needs of each student.” •
Cathryn Domrose is a staff writer. TO COMMENT, email
editor@nurse.com
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