Cyberclass is in Session
Scott Mace

Distance-learning software allows instructors to reach more students and presents a more convenient way for students to obtain their degrees.

On a warm August morning, nursing students midway between their first and second years file into a classroom at the Chabot College School of Nursing in Hayward, Calif. There, Joanne Berven, RN leads the class through a review of the skills they learned during the first year. Then, Berven briefs them on something novel they can expect this fall. For the first time, they can expect to be taking pathophysiology classroom quizzes online.

Using software from Blackboard Inc. of Washington, D.C., Berven and colleague Connie Telles, RN, are two new members of the nursing instructional world to discover the benefits of putting classroom tasks on the World Wide Web. Blackboard and competitors like WebCT, Inc., based in Lynnfield, Mass., also support online collaboration between students and can take the drudgery out of distributing assignments, as well as correcting and posting results from paper-based tests.

Like many nursing instructors, Telles and Berven recently started using Blackboard with the encouragement of the college’s Instructional Technology Center, but the school is not yet mandating use of the Web in all classes at the college.
“I like computers,” Telles says. “I don’t use my textbooks as my only source. I also use the Internet. With the Internet I can get current information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Cancer Society, and other reputable sites.”

Simply automating a test sounds like a small thing, and in a way, it is. But it’s also a vital stepping-stone to expanding the educational opportunities available to nurses.

ValleyCare Health System, 20 miles to the east, partners with Chabot and Las Positas Community College on its own nursing program. This fall, a videoconference link will allow instructors at ValleyCare or Chabot to teach students at both locations at once.

“When I’m lecturing in Livermore, when a student in Hayward has a question, I should be able to call on that person,” Berven says.

At the remote site, an attendant monitors students while they take tests. Although such attendants could also pass out and collect paper tests, Blackboard’s automation lets instructors gather test answers easily over the Internet.

Berven also likes Blackboard’s ability to serve up the same set of test questions to students in a random order, so that students seated next to each other are unlikely to be responding to the same question at the same time. Berven is also able to configure the online test so students must answer the question in front of them right then and there, and can’t go back to it later.

This mimics the testing experiences after the students receive their Associate in Arts degree when they take the test developed by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing. All nurses must pass this test to receive their RN in California from the California Board of Registered Nursing.

Test start and stop times are of the instructors’ choosing. Instructors also decide when and how to post grades online for student access.

“The students don’t come to me with as many individual questions regarding their grade as before,” says Telles, who used Blackboard to enter grades in an Adult Health class during the past academic year. “I’m not answering individual e-mails. I’m not answering my phone messages or my pager for ‘What’s my grade?’ All they have to do is go online.”

Online Ease

The business of delivering nursing education courses entirely online is booming. Excelsior College, the nation’s largest virtual university, has graduated thousands of nurses in its 30-year history.

About two years ago, faculty began using WebCT in a graduate degree program with an emphasis on clinical informatics. The program received the approval of the National League for Nursing, “which is a big thing” according to Susan Newbold, RN, who teaches an online course at Excelsior. (Newbold is also a doctoral candidate in nursing at the University of Maryland.)

“The only part that’s not online is, when students are in their last course, they have to come to a central location” in Albany, N.Y., which is where Excelsior is based, Newbold says.

Why take classes entirely online? “Convenience,” Newbold says. “Students usually have another job. They usually have kids. They might be the sole support of their family. They might live remotely where they do not have this kind of program available.”

Because WebCT and Blackboard are Web-based, students don’t have to install additional software on their PCs, but a broadband Internet connection is highly recommended. “I’ve actually sat and taught my class at my mother’s house in central Illinois on a 26k modem,” Newbold says. “But it’s painful.”

Online students can take some classes at their own pace. Others are so-called “cohort classes,” where instructors present students with subjects, and then small groups of them have discussions about those topics, via built-in e-mail or chat systems.

“It’s a misconception that taking an online course is easier than something in person,” Newbold says. “From the instructor point of view, it’s a different way of thinking. A course that you teach in the classroom doesn’t always lend itself to an online environment, so you often have to reconceptualize the course.

“As an instructor, I can’t cue into little keys like there’s a student there and she’s falling asleep, I know she’s not getting the content,” Newbold says.

Figuring all this out, including how to encourage online participation by students and how to grade accordingly — you could write a book about it. In fact, Newbold’s contributed to one: Developing an Online Course: Best Practices for Nurse Educators, published by Springer Publishing Company earlier this year.

Central Connection

The Web can enhance a vast range of learning experiences for nursing students. At Drexel University in Philadelphia, each clinical nursing course now has something called a clinical communication center (CCC) which resides in Blackboard. At the CCC sites, students can find “all the forms they would ever need to bring to clinical,” says Gloria Donnelly, RN, PhD, dean and professor of the university’s College of Nursing and Health Professions. “If students forget their care plan forms, all they need to do is find a computer to download what they need.

“If they’re in cardiac, there are 10 tip sheets on the care of cardiac patients,” Donnelly says. “If they’re in pediatrics, there are tip sheets for that.”

The school’s discussion board hums at the end of the clinical week, as students join their colleagues and teachers online. Clinic personnel can join in the discussion, finding out what the students are supposed to be learning during the rotation. “It’s a wonderful way for students to share their experiences, to learn other things that will help them in clinical. It is a real enhancement to their didactic courses,” Donnelly says.

Although Blackboard does provide training days to all users at Drexel, “if you can do e-mail, you can do Blackboard,” Donnelly says.

“Online learning is probably one of the most powerful learning experiences that students have since it keeps the students engaged,” Donnelly says. “You can’t sleep in the back with your computer. And you can quote me!” she adds with a laugh.
The cost of services like Blackboard varies depending upon usage. A WebCT spokesperson says that schools just beginning their deployments can expect to pay around $18,000.

Scott Mace is a freelance writer. To comment on this story, send e-mail to editorca@nurseweek.com.