Higher education is evolving. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, distance education in master’s nursing programs has been steadily rising since 2015, offering improved access, flexibility, and student advancement. In fact, a recent survey reports that a primary target demographic for online programs is adults returning to school.
Distance education opens opportunities for non-traditional students to advance their careers under different circumstances. A recent report by Deloitte showed that 26% of higher education students hold full-time jobs while attending school, and 44% are 24 or older. A virtual learning experience is a good fit for professionals juggling work and home responsibilities along with their post-graduate education.
A roundup of data on higher learning noted that, among graduate students in the United States, 52% felt their online courses were a “better learning experience” than their onsite classes. The flexibility of online learning accommodates the schedules of busy professionals, while the constant technological evolution of distance learning provides a more customizable experience than traditional classroom learning.
Early distance education was similar to the one-dimensional lecture style of in-person learning. From the original mail-based correspondence courses and televised classes to the first fully online degree programs in 1989, the concept largely remained the same—you read, watched, or listened to an educator lecture.
This model may be familiar, but it’s an inflexible learning environment that is only optimal for some students, while others struggle to adapt their learning needs to fit. In recent years, this approach has begun to evolve, leveraging more innovations in technology.
The Harvard Business Review reports that colleges allocate only 5% of their budget to IT, but that is expected to quickly change. Global impact intelligence platform HolonIQ predicts that EdTech venture capital will nearly triple over the next decade.
As distance education shifts from simple remote learning to next-generation technologies and as non-traditional students become the new normal, it’s time to set aside the old one-dimensional learning tools and engage your graduate students in a learning experience that empowers them to reach their next-level goals.
Digital Test Prep Is the Next Step
The growing momentum in the digital learning environment has created new ways to reach different types of learners. Online learning has gone from static to interactive, using innovations such as virtual simulations, virtual and augmented reality, mobile devices, and cloud technology.
As education evolves with technology, educators are finding modern ways to adapt the one-size-fits-all lecture style to accommodate different learning needs.
Interactive exam preparation is the natural next step for today’s nursing and social work graduate students. One tool has everything you need to connect your faculty and students for a powerful learning experience. Using technology and analytics, ExamPrepConnect University Solutions creates a personalized interactive learning experience to prepare your students for the culmination of their post-graduate education—their certification and licensure exams.
Supercharge Your Recruitment
When you give faculty a customizable tool that improves student engagement, outcomes, and exam pass rates, you create a compelling recruitment narrative for prospective students. Your graduates’ successes say more to prospective students than a brochure ever could.
Empower Your Faculty
While other exam prep tools leave students to prepare on their own, ExamPrepConnect University Solutions brings your faculty into the process to provide students with support to achieve passing scores. Increase engagement and identify the unique needs of your students’ by assigning curricula backed by a powerful metric dashboard to prepare them to pass their certification or licensure exam.
ExamPrepConnect for Faculty:
Assess test performance.
Assign and tracking curricula.
Identify strengths/weaknesses.
Intervene based on data.
Tailor teaching to student needs.
Engage Your Students
Interactive content is designed to boost student performance through customizable study plans, optimized to support personal learning styles. Students can review content any time, on any device, that accommodates their preferred learning styles.
Whether they learn best through visual, auditory, reading/writing, or hands-on means, ExamPrepConnect University Solutions has the tools to support their learning process and ensure they’re certification or licensure ready.
ExamPrepConnect for students:
Interactive content review.
Q&A with rationales.
Simulated exams.
Discussion boards.
Flashcards.
Games.
Seeing Is Believing
Meet with an ExamPrepConnect expert for a demonstration of how ExamPrepConnect University Solutionsprepares your students for high stakes exams, such as FNP, PMHNP, and AGNP certifications in nursing and ASWB, master’s, and bachelor’s licensure in social work. The demonstration is customized to your needs, just as ExamPrepConnect University Solutions is customized to your faculty and student needs. Click Request Demo to send a message to our demo team.
Evidence-based practice is at the heart of nursing—and most of that evidence is based on quantitative research. For nurses who are merely competent in math, though, interpreting the numbers can be a challenge. And if your own facility with statistics is middling, trying to mentor semi-numerate DNP students may leave you feeling helpless at times.
Help is on the way. On May 19, data analysis expert James Lani, Ph.D., MS is hosting a free webinar specifically aimed at faculty members who mentor graduate students for dissertation, thesis, or scholarly projects and are seeking to take their command of statistics to the next level to better guide those students.
Dr. Lani, the CEO of Intellectus Statistics, has been helping faculty and graduate students with their quantitative research for over two decades.
In his upcoming webinar session, Dr. Lani will use mock data to work through faculty and students’ research questions, prepare and graph data, select and conduct the correct statistical analyses, and demonstrate how to appropriately present results. He will also cover sample size and power analysis, data management, and visualization techniques, and at the end of the presentation, he can even provide faculty with project-specific help.
James Lani holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, an MS in Psychology with an emphasis in Experimental Methods from California State University Long Beach, a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, and minors in Mathematics and Human Services from California State University, Fullerton.
Who can attend: Faculty members in nursing, social work, counseling, public health, psychology, and health administration at any stage of their research or faculty who mentor students’ research as they pursue their degree (i.e., Dissertations, DNP Project for Nurses, Fieldwork and Supervision for Behavior Analysts, etc.)
A three-time UIC graduate, McFarlin joined the faculty of UIC Nursing in 2005 after delivering more than 4,000 babies in her 35 years as a nurse-midwife. During her tenure at UIC Nursing, she served as head of the Department of Women, Children and Family Health Science (now Human Development Nursing Science).
“Dr. McFarlin has had an enormous influence on our college, and more broadly, in the field of maternal and infant health,” says UIC Nursing Dean Eileen Collins, PhD, RN, ATSF, FAAN. “Her program of research used novel technologies to address stubborn problems in women’s healthcare.”
Driven by the question of what causes preterm births , McFarlin combined her perspective as a midwife and sonographer with her expertise in research.
Her initial line of research was to develop and test an ultrasound method to detect microstructural changes in the tissue of the cervix to signal risk of spontaneous preterm birth.
Collaborating with professors William O’Brien and Aiguo Han at the Bioacoustics Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, McFarlin developed a method to use quantitative ultrasound (QUS) to examine cervical changes associated with spontaneous preterm birth, first in pregnant rats, then translating the technique to humans.
McFarlin, O’Brien and Han are completing a study of cervical QUS in more than 500 pregnant people and are finalizing a model to predict people at risk of delivering prematurely.
“This technology has great potential to monitor treatment for preterm birth based on biomarkers, rather than waiting for symptoms of preterm birth when it is too late to intervene,” Collins says.
McFarlin is also a dedicated mentor, facilitating the success of junior faculty and students and her mentees. With research grants from major government agencies and private foundations, she has published 63 peer-reviewed articles during her career. She received the college’s Distinguished Mentor of Faculty and the Distinguished Researcher awards in 2020 and 2021, respectively.
McFarlin was also the recipient of the March of Dimes Jonas Salk Research Award, which is presented to top Illinois healthcare leaders who have facilitated improvements in the health of mothers and infants.
Oftentimes, social or economic disadvantages prevent a person from living their healthiest life. Last year, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) announced grant funding to support projects that focus on the impact of such health disparities on those with diabetes.
Louise Reagan, MS, APRN, ANP-BC, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut School of Nursing, received one of those grants — called the Health Disparities and Diabetes Innovative Clinical or Transitional Science Award — as her research focuses on people with diabetes who are reentering society from prison.
Reagan says her team has found that people living with diabetes in prison lack critical knowledge and skills regarding managing their diabetes. As these individuals transition to the community, they are required to self-manage diabetes independently and are not prepared to do so.
Diabetes survival and self-management skills include knowing what foods to eat, how to control blood glucose (sugar), when to take insulin, how to manage sick days, and how to access health care. These skills are critical for incarcerated individuals, as their rate of diabetes diagnosis is almost 50% higher than the general population.
“I wanted to figure out what we could do to reach persons with diabetes at this critical transition period when they’re just getting out of prison and into the community, and how we could help them self-manage their illness,” Reagan says. “The Connecticut Department of Correction (CDOC), a community collaborator and advocate for the needs of persons transitioning from prison to the community, and my team don’t want citizens returning to the community from prison to end up in the emergency room being treated for hypoglycemia or dangerously low blood glucose when it can be prevented.”
Reagan worked as an advanced practice registered nurse in Hartford for 16 years, treating underserved populations with multiple comorbid diseases, including diabetes. This clinical work exposed her to the challenges that people released from prison or living in supervised community housing post-prison release face in self-managing their illness when reentering the community, and inspired her research.
She says many social barriers prevent patients from adequately caring for their own health. It can be challenging to provide diabetes education to recently released patients due to their multiple housing locations, desire for anonymity, and limited access to clinical care.
Additionally, she says, the priorities of people recently released from prison are often to avoid reentering prison, to find a job, and reestablish social and family relationships rather than manage their diabetes and other aspects of their health.
“Patients have many other competing needs when integrating into their societal roles,” Reagan says. “The Diabetes LIVE JustICE research provides an opportunity to help them with their health.”
Her study — called Diabetes Learning in Virtual Environments Just in Time for Community reEntry (Diabetes LIVE JustICE) — examines the feasibility and acceptability of a mobile app that provides diabetes education, support, and other resources in a virtual environment to people recently released from prison living in supervised community housing or on parole. Reagan’s goal is to improve health outcomes and reduce health inequities for this vulnerable population.
Reagan’s app, called LIVE Outside, contains live sessions with diabetes educators and instructive games to inform users about self-care.
Over the course of 12 weeks, Reagan will be measuring users’ diabetes knowledge, stress, and self-care after using LIVE Outside and comparing it to typical diabetes care education.
The mobile app is a culmination of projects Reagan has been working on since completing her postdoctoral fellowship at New York University. There, she served as a project director for an R01 study using a personal computer-based virtual environment called Diabetes LIVE, which promoted diabetes education to community-dwelling individuals.
Reagan’s proceeding research project with the CDOC, Diabetes Survival Skills (DSS), was an in-person intervention run within CDOC-managed correctional facilities. However, this project experienced attrition as individuals reentered society and could no longer participate, she says.
With collaboration and support from the Connecticut Department of Correction, Reagan anticipated taking in-person DSS interventions beyond prisons to supervised housing facilities to reach recently released individuals. This intervention, however, was put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This forced Reagan to get creative with her work, leading to her innovation and the ADA grant.
“I was thinking about my work, and I wondered, ‘what if we use a virtual environment and adapt it to a mobile environment?’ ” Reagan says. “We could adapt the virtual app, use my program from the Diabetes Survival Skills, and blend them into a mobile app.”
Given the need for diabetes self-management education during the critical transition from prison to the community, the CDOC was excited to work with Reagan again to develop a remote mobile option for the people with diabetes under their care. Reagan then collaborated with her colleagues from Diabetes LIVE — Constance Johnson (UTHealth Houston), Allison Vorderstrasse (University of Massachusetts Amherst), and Stephen Walsh (UConn School of Nursing) — to combine DSS and Diabetes LIVE into a mobile app.
Diabetes LIVE JustICE was created and Reagan applied for the ADA grant to propel her innovation forward.
“My team and I had been talking about making this app mobile,” Reagan says. “The grant allows us to put all our work together to collaborate on this new idea.”
Reagan says she is grateful to have received this grant and for the strong collaboration with and involvement of the CDOC.
“When I received notice that the project was going to be funded, it was just an unbelievable feeling,” she says. “For me, this grant meant I had the opportunity to help underserved populations with their health, and I am so grateful for that. I feel so thankful that we can offer something to these people that sometimes don’t have anything.”
This research is supported by an American Diabetes Association grant #11-21-ICTSHD-05 Health Disparities and Diabetes Innovative Clinical or Translational Science Award. To learn more about the grant program, visit professional.diabetes.org. To learn more about the UConn School of Nursing, visit nursing.uconn.edu and follow the School on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) has honored nurse and bioethicist Cynda Hylton Rushton, PhD, RN, FAAN, with its 2022 Marguerite Rodgers Kinney Award for a Distinguished Career.
Rushton receives the award for her exceptional contributions that enhance the care of critically ill patients and their families and the nurses who care for them, and further AACN’s mission and vision. The presentation will occur during the 2022 National Teaching Institute & Critical Care Exposition in Houston, May 16-18.
An international leader in bioethics and nursing, Rushton is the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics at the Johns Hopkins University Berman Institute of Bioethics and the JHU School of Nursing. She co-chairs Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Ethics Committee and Consultation Service. A founding member of the Berman Institute, she co-led the first National Nursing Ethics Summit that produced a Blueprint for 21st Century Nursing Ethics.
In 2016, she co-led a national collaborative, State of the Science Initiative: Transforming Moral Distress into Moral Resilience in Nursing and co-chaired the American Nurses Association’s professional issues panel that created “A Call to Action: Exploring Moral Resilience Toward a Culture of Ethical Practice.” She was a member of the National Academies of Medicine, Science and Engineering Committee that produced the report “Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being.”
“Dr. Rushton is an internationally recognized leader in nursing ethics, moral resilience and workforce issues and a longtime contributor to groundbreaking work on these topics,” said AACN President Beth Wathen. “Her work has influenced nursing practice, health policy and patient care.”
A member of AACN since 1979, Rushton is a frequent presenter at NTI and regularly contributes to AACN’s clinical journals.
Rushton is the chief synergy strategist for Maryland’s R3 Resilient Nurses Initiative, a statewide initiative to build resilience and ethical practice in nursing students and novice nurses.
She is a fellow of the Hastings Center bioethics research institute, chair of the Hastings Center Fellows Council and a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.
She is the editor and author of “Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare,” the first book to explore the emerging concept of moral resilience from a variety of perspectives including nursing, bioethics, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and contemplative practice.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing at the University of Kentucky, followed by a master’s degree in nursing at the Medical University of South Carolina and a PhD from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
About the Marguerite Rodgers Kinney Award: Established in 1997 and named for an AACN past president, the Marguerite Rodgers Kinney Award for a Distinguished Career recognizes extraordinary and distinguished professional contributions that further AACN’s mission and vision of a healthcare system driven by the needs of patients and their families where acute and critical care nurses make their optimal contribution. Recipients of this Visionary Leadership Award receive a $1,000 gift to the charity of their choice and a crystal replica of the presidential “Vision” icon. Other Visionary Leadership awards, AACN’s highest honor, include the Lifetime Membership Award and the AACN Pioneering Spirit Award.
For nursing education in a post-pandemic landscape, technologies such as simulation will continue to help educate students. And while plenty of people are interested in becoming nurses, not enough nurse educators may be available, and limited access to clinical placements may hinder those who want to enter the profession.
Remote teaching and simulations: what should we retain post-Covid?
During the pandemic, increased use of technology helped nursing students at the University of Maryland School of Nursing meet their competencies, according to Bimbola F. Akintade, Ph.D., MBA, MHA, ACNP-BC, NEA-BC, FAANP, associate professor and associate dean, master’s program at the school. Because students couldn’t physically care for patients in the hospital as part of their clinicals, the university transitioned to simulation. Using its 25 simulation labs and simulation team, the school made greater use of both high-fidelity simulations in the lab, as well as asynchronous virtual simulation.
In entering a more endemic stage, the university is now evaluating what courses should remain online. The school, says Akintade, is revising its entire curriculum based on the new Essentials from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). “This is a perfect time,” he says, “while we’re revising the curriculum, to identify what courses could stay online to create additional flexibilities for our adult learners.” The Essentials: Core Competencies for Professional Nursing Education provides a framework for preparing individuals as members of the discipline of nursing.
“For a long time, we’ve convinced ourselves that there was this primary way of teaching, of education dissemination to students. And the pandemic turned that on its head. Certain courses that we believe could not be effectively taught in a virtual space could be because we did it. Now we’re charging ourselves to go back and reevaluate how we taught our courses and identify what courses could successfully remain virtual.”
The Maryland State Board of Nursing, says Akintade, had allowed up to 50% of clinical experience to be done through simulation. The school, taking a more conservative approach, kept that to 10% to 20%. That increased significantly during the pandemic, he notes.
“Now we’re being intentional about reevaluating that to determine how much of our clinical experience for students could be accomplished through simulation,” he says. “We anticipate that we will do more simulation than we did pre-pandemic.”
Finding faculty
In an endemic healthcare landscape, finding nursing educators and clinical placement spots may pose a challenge. Clinical placement spots, says Akintade, who has been at the school since 2011, may be the more rate-limiting factor in growing a nursing education program.
Though interest in baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs is strong, thousands of qualified students are turned away from four-year colleges and universities each year, notes an AACN press release about the association’s just-released “Annual Survey of Institutions with Baccalaureate and Higher Degree Nursing Programs.” Given the persistent shortage of nurse faculty, AACN remains concerned that 14,743 applications were turned away from graduate programs, which may further limit the pool of potential nurse faculty, according to the release. The primary barriers to accepting all qualified students at nursing schools, says the release, continue to be insufficient clinical placement sites, faculty, preceptors, and classroom space, as well as budget cuts.
The nursing shortage, says Akintade, has not helped matters, with older nurses retiring and some younger nurses leaving the profession. “The response is growth,” he says. “We recognize the need for additional nurses in the state of Maryland. So our baccalaureate program is growing.” The university has a target of enrolling over 500 nursing students a year in either the BSN program or entry-into-practice master’s program.
No lack of interest
One unalloyed bright spot from the pandemic is new interest in healthcare professions. The AACN survey finds that student enrollment in entry-level baccalaureate nursing programs increased by 3.3% in 2021. Growth was seen in both baccalaureate programs and doctor of nursing practice (DNP) programs.
The pandemic has exposed many individuals who never considered becoming a healthcare professional to that idea, suggests Akintade. “We’ve seen an increase in the number of our applicants even through COVID.”
“We’ve been the sung and sometimes, unfortunately, the unsung heroes through the pandemic. Nursing as a profession was really put on the forefront through the pandemic.”
Help is on the way. On May 19, data analysis expert James Lani, Ph.D., MS is hosting a 
During the pandemic, increased use of technology helped nursing students at the University of Maryland School of Nursing meet their competencies, according to Bimbola F. Akintade, Ph.D., MBA, MHA, ACNP-BC, NEA-BC, FAANP, associate professor and associate dean, master’s program at the school. Because students couldn’t physically care for patients in the hospital as part of their clinicals, the university transitioned to simulation. Using its 25 simulation labs and simulation team, the school made greater use of both high-fidelity simulations in the lab, as well as asynchronous virtual simulation.