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Saturday, October 31, 2009: 3:35 PM
Learning Objective 1: identify four innovative teaching strategies and four approaches to building community partnerships that increase accessibility and flexibility to graduate nursing education.
Learning Objective 2: adapt and apply innovative teaching strategies and approaches to building community partnerships to their academic setting.
This presentation is an exemplar of how to employ a combination of traditional and contemporary approaches to distance accessible and classroom teaching to meet the evolving educational needs of graduate nursing students. Innovative uses of technology and community partnerships are blended to create a curriculum that promotes reflective practice, critical thinking, and enhances the role of the clinical preceptor. We have employed five key technological applications to reach students at a distance and engage them in active learning. These include state of the art video conferencing systems, a visual and auditory collaborative web conferencing environment, an online preceptor/student training module, a comprehensive electronic archive to store and access student work and lastly, and a web based data collection tool of student-patient clinical encounters. All of these applications promote student skill-building in nursing informatics, enhance collaboration, and simplify collection of patient encounter data. Along with contemporary teaching approaches, our distance accessible program updates traditional approaches such as case study analysis and mini lectures to promote critical thinking and reflection. In order to address the challenges of distance learning, we are collaborating with community partners who support these innovative approaches to graduate education. In addition, we are implementing various networking initiatives including a community advisory board, annual meeting, outreach programs, and newsletter. These innovative uses of technology and community partnerships increase accessibility to graduate nursing education and enable faculty to negotiate and tailor program design to the meet needs of students.