Innovating a New Structured Pedagogy for RN Learners Online

Posted on July 17, 2007 by Jennifer Brady

The following is from a recent interview with Kathleen Polley, Director, Online RN-BS Program, University of Massachusetts Boston, ranked in the top 9% of nursing schools nationwide. In this exclusive Q&A, Ms. Polley's gives us a preview of her upcoming presentation this September 26th at the Academic Impressions conference being held in St. Louis, Missouri. At this event, her presentation will address the following:

A UMass Boston needs assessment prompted creation of a new online program that evaluated a target market to the level of identifying student characteristics, stressors, and personal/professional communication issues that could be barriers to student retention. This session will explore a conceptual model that creates a structured pedagogy to meet the personality and behavioral characteristics of nursing students that can be adapted to any subject area.

In brief, Ms. Polley worked with key departments at UMass Boston to initiate sweeping administrative and policy innovations in the way nurses are enrolled, technologically prepared, monitored, managed, mentored, and supported throughout their involvement in the online nursing degree program. These changes have resulted in an increase in just three years of from two applicants in the traditional program to some 250 current nursing students achieving a 90% retention rate and an average 3.0 GPA. A lecturer, instructor, and a career-long nurse with extraordinary credentials in her own right.; Ms. Polley speaks to her development of a support system, she knows from first hand experience, is of critical importance to a very unique and special group of health care professionals who place extraordinarily demanding requirements upon themselves and others to achieve the best outcomes.

Q: First of all, congratulations on your amazing success in such a short period of time in bringing the UMass Boston online nursing degree program to such new levels of national esteem within the healthcare community. Perhaps you can start by telling me more about the personality and behavioral characteristics of nurses you found to have such a critical bearing on how online education programs should operate for them?

A: Nurses are very caring and action oriented partners on the healthcare delivery team. Nurses in the acute care environment are use to information being at their fingertips to assess patient status and needed interventions. If a nurse has to wait an hour for stat lab results, she will be very anxious. As such, nurses are people who want answers, now. They are very direct. If they have a question, they want to speak to a person and they want that person available to them immediately. That means we needed to create a system of application, enrollment and study that granted them ready access to real people with ready answers to common questions with a minimum of “run-around”. Traditional college students have many opportunities to meet with individuals at the University; they are on site. They can visit administrative offices when these offices are open from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. Nursing schedules are 24/7 365 days a year. They cannot always take time out to come here when it is convenient for us to see them. That means today we're found ways to be available all the time; we solve the problems and answer the questions directly; no one is transferred or forwarded to another department. Nurses call, we pick up the phone, we address their immediate concern. If they leave a message we get back to them as soon as possible.

Q: You say nurses are direct and somewhat impatient. Can you give me an example of how this translates to their online learning concerns?

A: Sure. The first question every potential student asks us is, "How long is it going to take to get my degree?" They say, "I'm 40 and I don't want to spend ten years getting this degree… how long is it going to take?" This question usually comes after they have made an initial inquiry about our program. To help address that issue immediately we send them an electronic academic advising form which lists all prerequisites and courses needed for graduation. Then in a conversation, one-on-one that is specific to them, we get right to the point. We say, for example, "You need to take these five courses and it is going to take you two years." Even long after that, the personalized contact continues. They are not a number at UMass. In fact, we get to know them very well, sometimes right down to what's going on in their personal lives. Nurses interact in a very intimate and individual way with their patients and we have found that they need that same intimate contact with the University. Nurses need people they can talk to and share their concerns and problems. They cannot talk about most of their professional issues with family and friends due to patient confidentiality and the nature of their work. Only other nurses can truly understand the nurses' intimate relationship with life and death. We give them a safe place to have these discussions. In fact, during their course of study we have a weekly virtual chat online. Long after the course work ends, these nurses remain close friends. I should add, too, that during their entire course of study these nurses have the same advisor. Obviously this means we get to know each other very well.

Q: But beyond being available and accessible and accountable to them over their questions and concerns, does your new pedagogy accommodate their uniqueness’s in other ways?

A: Absolutely. Nurses may not be unique in this regard, but many of them are quite fearful about going back to college. They remember college as being a rather rigid place. They remember it being a deadline-driven place with little margin for unique personal circumstances. At UMass we now go out of our way to be less rigid, more flexible around deadlines, and we've eliminated a lot of what can only be described as nonsense when it comes to application requirements. Why, for example, do we need a high school transcript from a working health care professional who is already licensed? Why do we need them to write an essay that no one will ever read? We get right down to brass tacks. These are working adults. These are proven professionals.

Q: Based on your enrollment and retention statistics, your students must be finding the curriculum useful?

A: Again, I can admit that nurses may not be unique in this area as well, but they don't want to repeat courses they've already taken. They come here to learn new things. They have little patience for systems that are geared toward optimizing tuition dollars by insisting that students pay for a course they essentially had earlier from another institution. At UMass we have articulation agreements with seven community colleges. These agreements basically mean we accept the credits earned in courses taken elsewhere. This means our online course instruction can augment the students learning, not replicate it.

Q: I assume nurses adapt well to the online learning technology?

A: Not at all. Nurses have tremendous skills when it comes to bedside technology and health-care equipment for diagnoses and monitoring. But when it comes to computer technology, they rarely know the difference between a lap top and a desktop… an operating system from you name it. Two to three weeks in advance of their course work we bring them here for a technology orientation. They come here from all over. Those based far away can log in to our live classroom and complete their orientation remotely. This is a critical component of our modified approach. We refuse to let computer and Internet technology fears and anxieties stand in the way of academic success. Our focus here for them is on the course curriculum. That's their number one interest. Everything and anything that interferes with that we do our best to eliminate or minimize and I think this has much to do with the growth of this program.

Q: The retention rate statistic quoted by a lot of schools these days seems to be a soft stat that can be easy to manipulate and hard to compare across multiple institutions. What exactly do you mean by retention?

A: This is one place I'm not flexible. I think the definition of retention ought to be very clear and it should adhere to a high standard. In this program, Retention is measured by how many of our students enroll and complete the course of study and graduate within two years. Period. Beyond that I look for other important qualifiers to measure our performance. How many of these students, for example, will be going on to grad school. How many respond favorably when asked the question "Was this worth it?" Trust me, if nurses don't find the online education worthwhile, they stop attending. This was very obvious back in the day when nurses paid for these courses mostly out of their own pocket. But even today, even when they are getting tuition assistance from their employers, nurses are very discriminating. They don't have the time to waste.

Q: You've made much progress to date. Is there more to come?

A: The horizon for us is huge. Here's just one example. Our last class is usually dedicated to ethical, legal and health policy issues. It is usually led by our faculty and students, many of which come here, if they can, to participate in the session and others who watch and participate online. The technology that permits us to do this also allows us to bring to this forum a variety of health care experts who are defining the issues of contemporary importance in our field. We plan to bring more of these leaders to our class forums. This means our program will build an online archive of the most important people with the best current ideas in this business. In the long run, I am very proud, and sometimes amazed myself by, the depth and texture of what we can offer.

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One Response to “Innovating a New Structured Pedagogy for RN Learners Online”

Nursing Shortage, Yes; Shortage of Learning Options, No. » UMassOnline Blog on January 24th, 2008 10:17 am

[…] certificates and degrees in the healthcare sector. And, in case you missed this earlier post, here’s a recently posted interview with Kathleen Polley, Director, Online RN-BS Program, University of Massachusetts Boston, and here’s one in which […]

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