The article published in 2008, “A Rubric for Improving the Quality of Online Courses” (by Jane Blood-Siegfried, Nancy Short, Carla Gene Rapp, Elizabeth Hill, Steve Talbert, John Skinner, Amy Campbell, and Linda Goodwin) describes an evaluation rubric to measure quality in the graduate online curriculum, offering a useful tool for online course development.

Dr. Short and Dr. Blood-Siegfried are happy to know people found this rubric was useful, “Over 1000 downloads have occurred for the first release so I guess they decided to feature it again… It (the rubric) certainly is important for our own programs. I am pleased to see that it has finally been featured. We did a lot of good work that year with our CIT partners.”

The full text of the article is available for download.

About the Fellowship:

Six Nursing faculty and one graduate student participated in a CIT Fellows Program to develop methods evaluate the quality of the School’s online courses. The group created an evaluation rubric, applied it to their courses, and conducted student focus groups to provide feedback about online course quality. The group also performed a curriculum analysis to locate gaps in content coverage in their series of core courses. Visit the Fellows Program archive page to know more about the fellowship participants, activities, outcomes, and student focus group feedback, etc.

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students engaged in a unique active learning experience in Spring 2009 as they tackled Nursing 652 Transforming The Nation’s Health at the Duke School of Nursing.  Dr. Nancy M. Short regularly challenged students to push far beyond their level of comfort.  One assignment required students to prepare a script, plan interviews and settings and “shoot” a health policy advocacy video.  Students checked out Flip camcorders at the Link and participated in a custom hand-on training workshop provided by CIT. Within a three-week time window, the students used Flip camcorders to film the scenes and edited “draft videos” with the built-in FlipShare software.  After the instructor’s review and approval, eleven of the 23 videos have been launched on the DUSON YouTube Channel and can be seen under the playlist of the Influencing Health Policy.

In addition to the digital video assignment, students in N652 presented oral advocacy presentations to a panel of lobbyists and elected officials, developed a 1 page advocacy fact sheet for a policymaker, and wrote a health issue analysis paper.

Click the image below to watch all of the 11 video clips.

Additional Information

Dr. Short is an alumna of the RWJF Health Policy Fellowship and spent 2005 as a health legislative aide in the office of the U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Senator Bill Frist.

Project description

The purpose of this project is to establish and pilot a Second Life (SL) learning environment for faculty and students in the Duke School of Nursing (DUSON). Constance Johnson and her colleagues have explored student perceptions of learning using three different environments, and built a virtual classroom structure on the DUSON’s parcel on a Duke SL Island. In addition to building a virtual classroom they have also identified, collated, and developed orientation resources and procedures that could be provided to students and faculty for DUSON in the SL community. They develop and test with the students policies and procedures that could serve as suggested ground rules for DUSON to adopt in their SL learning activities, to ensure that students are able to focus on the educational components of the activities, rather than the novelty of the application and the overwhelming social aspects of SL.

The short-term outcomes of this project are development of a DUSON infrastructure for faculty and student participation in SL, and the assistance of students from at least two different nursing specialty areas and programs with evaluation and tailoring of the infrastructure.

The expected long-term outcomes of this project are facilitated participation of faculty and students from across DUSON, the University, and DUSON’s practice, service, and educational partners, in innovative, 3D learning activities.

Students’ positive feedback and comments in a recent evaluation have proved value of virtual environments: promotes distance education, allows simulation of scenarios, real time interaction between students and professor, interactive with 3 spaces, and self-directed study.  Future directions: to build autopsy rooms and simulation labs.

Watch the YouTube video below to see Dr. Johnson and her students use of virtual world Second Life as a teaching and learning tool:

Project start date: 6/16/2008
Funding awarded: $2,000

Additional information

There is a short overview on the Duke School of Nursing’s website about the work Constance Johnson is doing in Second Life.

Project description

This project will provide geographically dispersed online Duke nursing informatics graduate students with collaborative tools that will help them acquire, critique, summarize, and disseminate available HIT studies and evidence reports. Linda Goodwin will utilize informatics experts, mobile technologies, and remote (virtual) teamwork that enable both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration to compile HIT evaluation resources, critique them for level of evidence, and make them available to a world-wide audience. The project will be focused on immersing students, both Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Program and Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) in real-world informatics issues and projects in health care.

Linda Goodwin and her students will experiment with different types of mobile tools and web-based citation tools, explore whether mobile technologies that permit student access to synchronous teamwork tools from anywhere they can gain wireless Internet access will improve both the process and the products of remote online teamwork.

Project start date: 6/2/2008
Funding awarded: $7,500

Project description

This project will develop a series of short video lectures taped via a desk-top, Flip-video on a tiny tripod. A “Video Workbook” will be created for the N220: Nursing Care of the Childbearing Family, upon finishing all recordings.

These recordings will be uploaded to Blackboard, iTunes U, or other media for students to view and download to their iPods. Students will receive a designed workbook with objectives, lecture highlights and worksheets and directed to the lectures which will be numbered on Bb, iTunes U, or other media. Students then can load the lecture on a video iPod for mobile studying, or view the lecture online. This will accompany the regular course materials. But instead of the course coordinator lecturing via PP slides, class room time can be spent processing critical nursing content as it relates to nursing care of the childbearing family.

Helen Gordon foresees how the project makes different: “I spend HOURS lecturing on small segments of content that consume valuable class time. Now students will spend this time, hearing me and seeing me via video mini-lectures. They will have the satisfaction of receiving the content they want….and I will have the class time back to focus on nursing actions of the material… This format will appeal to the audio learning styles of many of the students. The organization and creation of the workbook will be a key shift in how I have taught this before.”

By the end of the summer 2008 semester, Helen Gordon will randomly select about 7 representative students from her over 60 students to form a focus group for evaluating the project.

Project start date: 2/1/2008
Funding awarded: $ 500

This project created video series that demonstrate a specific adult physical examination taught in N332 Physical Assessment. The various formats of the videos were integrated to online courses posted in Blackboard, to self-paced web tutorials for online learning and to video iPods for mobile learning.

This demo session of the physical examination was taught each year to about 150-200 students in N332 Physical Assessment and Diagnostic Reasoning at Duke University School of Nursing. Faculty, actors, models who were involved in this demo had to repeat the same live demo to show many different sections of students before doing a laboratory practice.

This shift to ‘in house material’ videos and the subsequent movement of the clips to iPOD has changed instructors’ teaching in a major way. Because instructors not longer have to use live demo or non Duke specific video material the content drift for the course is much reduced. It has also very significantly affected the teaching style of at least 7 faculty and their respective courses. In addition, after instructors were able to fully utilize the videos this semester, the students have been so enthusiastic that they are moving ahead with this resource and influencing and enhancing their applications.

“The huge student enthusiasm for this product has convinced me that convenience and portability is very valuable to our students…likely to others…The university could do more to support these initiatives. They are time and resource intensive to start but the payoff is very good.” Dr. Susan Denman, the project primary investigator said when she evaluated this project.

Project start date: 4/20/2006
Funding awarded: $ 3,250

Additional Information

Center for Instructional Technology showcase poster on this project

Duke University Media Services was funded by CIT for field production

Project Description

As part of the CIT’S Spring 2006 Fellows program designed for faculty teaching large classes, Dr. Queen Utley-Smith wished to be more creative in her use of teaching strategies to keep her students interested and engaged.

In the program, Utley-Smith and the other Fellows were introduced to a wide range of methods to enhance student learning and engagement in large courses including new approaches to lectures and effective use of student feedback and groups. She tried to use Blackboard’s blogs in her Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (N502) class for guided student reflections. She also used “opinion polls” to determine student attitudes about health promotion and to then use their responses as a starting point for facilitated discussion, which worked well for her.

She reported that some strategies she applied to her N502 course were successful in keeping her students interested and engaged and she would be certain to use in the future a number of ideas that were presented during the Fellows program.

Project start date: 1/2006
Funding awarded: $ 1,250

Project Description

As part of the CIT’s Spring 2006 Fellows program designed for faculty teaching large classes, Dr. Elizabeth Hill wished to find solutions on how to keep approximately 50 students with hugely varying backgrounds engaged in a course that requires understanding and applying concepts that are often new to them and can be quite complex.

In the program, Hill and the other Fellows were introduced to a wide range of methods to enhance student learning and engagement in large courses including new approaches to lectures and effective use of student feedback and groups. She tried to encourage and monitor attendance, promote active class participation in a classroom where students have full wireless access to the internet, and encourage group work and independent learning. The particular technologies she used were:

• Students were provided the link to SmartDraw: Students are required to develop timelines for their projects, and this free download gave them the opportunity to experiment with electronic versions of timelines, charts, and graphs.

• As students are required to do several group projects, she set each group up with a discussion board in Blackboard, so they could communicate and send information back and forth via Blackboard. They were also set up to use virtual classroom.

• As their final project, students will be required to do a PowerPoint presentation of their proposed health care program.

Project start date: 1/2006
Funding awarded: $1,250

Additional Information

Dr. Hill’s poster for the CIT showcase 2007