The nursing field requires employees to balance unusual schedules, communicate with a wide variety of people and adapt to ever-changing professional relationships.
They’re the same qualities that generally make for good online nursing instructors, who more than anything need to show flexibility on behalf of their students, nursing educators say.
“I think nurses are used to being adaptable,” says Carrie Cormack, an instructor and the lead pediatric nurse practitioner faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina. “I think that’s a trait that many nurses share.”
That doesn’t mean prospective online nursing students should take faculty quality for granted when making an educational decision. But the factors that indicate a great instructor might differ from other educational fields.
[Explore the cheapest online graduate nursing programs for out-of-state students.]
For example, some believe the level of a faculty members’ previous teaching experience may not be particularly important.
“Your experience caring for patients, when you’re teaching nursing, that’s going to be more what you bring to an educational setting,” Cormack says.
In many online nursing courses, students work with approved preceptors, outside professionals approved by an online program who oversee physical tasks a student needs to complete during his or her studies. This frees their online instructors to focus more on tracking student progress and responding to questions and comments rather than trying to virtually lead them through procedures.
Therefore, the best instructors, educators say, accomplish the straightforward but sometimes difficult task of being online when their students are.
“You really need a person committed to the medium and willing to work when students are working,” says Raeann LeBlanc, an assistant clinical professor of nursing at University of Massachusetts–Amherst.
Mary Jean Schumann, interim dean of the school of nursing at George Washington University, agrees that responsiveness is an important faculty trait, one prospective students can test by emailing admissions counselors or faculty to ask questions.
Schumann says it’s not imperative that online professors have previous online teaching experience. But the ones her institution hires must prove themselves capable of communicating to students several ways, including through phone, email, videoconferencing, instant messaging and text messaging.
[Learn how to get into a top online graduate nursing program.]
“It’s really important that they make an effort to use different sorts of media and use multimedia presentations and opportunities so that they can appeal to a learner who is very auditory or a learner who is very visual or a learner who is very much hands on,” Schumann says.
Elizabeth Starr, an online nursing education student at the University of Texas–Tyler and a face-to-face nursing instructor at Trinity Valley Community College, agrees that the flexibility of her instructors has been important.
And while using different digital instructional tools can be beneficial, she says her professors’ most important trait has been the willingness to have live conversations either by phone or video conference.
“You still have to be available to talk,” Starr says. “I’ve probably talked on the phone to my instructors almost half and half with emails. You still have to have that being available.”
Isoke Baptiste, an adult gerontology nursing practitioner student at GW as well as a nurse at a private practice in Washington, agrees it’s important not only to be able to reach your professor, but to be able to connect on a level that goes beyond content.
In her three years in her online program, she says her most effective relationships with instructors include discussions that span across academic material to real-life issues of parenting, family and work-life balance.
“They’re real people, so they understand real-people working situations,” she says. “When you’re online and you’re working and you have other factors in your day-to-day life, they have the same thing too.”
[Weigh the cost of an online master’s in nursing.]
Schumann agrees those personal bonds are important, especially between students and instructors in specific nursing specializations.
She also believes online nursing students will be best served by programs whose faculty have a wide range of experiences, because that will foster the kind of collaborative work environment among faculty that mirrors the medical world students will enter upon graduation.
And Cormack says it’s beneficial to learn in a problem-based setting that allows younger students to draw from the academic content to solve hypothetical scenarios while more seasoned students use their professional experience.
That method of instruction may be established by the program, but can also be instilled by an individual professor.
“I think instructors need to work hard at developing a program that really meets the needs of all of their learners, regardless of the amount of the experience they have,” Cormack says.
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