Welcome to the NURS 5283 course blog!

We’ll be using this blog to explore our own teaching and learning experiences in TWU’s online Masters in Nursing Education program. This project will comprise 15% of your course grade. You will be required to make reflective journal entries to your blog once per week and to read/comment on peers’ entries throughout the course. I developed this learning experience for use in my own sections of NURS 5283 and was very pleased. In fact, Nichola Rodriguez, a student from the previous course, will be joining us on the journey. Earlier in the summer, I approached Dr. Sheriff about using this collaborative course project in her fall section (this course) – and that is how you came to have me as a guest instructor for this portion of NURS 5283. Before we go any further, allow me to explain what I had in mind when developing this course project. I think you’ll find my story interesting.

Educational evaluation means many things, but it boils down to making judgments about the merit and worth of educational programs for purposes of informing decisions about those programs. As nurse educators, we have to determine what our programs are accomplishing in order to make hard decisions about how (or sometimes, if) to carry them forward. There are many ways to go about evaluating a program –and you’ll be exploring these approaches in your course– but there are a few aspects of programs that are commonly neglected in both formal and informal evaluative work. One such oversight is the experiences of the actual students/teachers enrolled in programs.

Certainly, it is important for prospective students to know the NCLEX passage rate for a nursing program they are considering, just as it is valuable to know that the program meets identified goals for the institutional and professoinal regulatory bodies. These common accreditation-related concerns are important for a number of reasons, but they must be understood as part of a more complex whole; at some point, we must consider what students enrolled in nursing programs actually do, how they perceive their own experiences as students/teachers, and the affect of the educational experience on students' lives.

While such characterizations of nursing students’ experiences may not be terribly useful in answering the questions that are required in CCNE/NLNAC accreditation visits, they are invaluable if you wish to understand the educational experiences of those involved with a nursing program. Each group of stakeholders in a program may have different concerns, and experiential evaluation may inform each in different ways.

The prevalent view of educational evaluation as a primarily summative form of evaluation was foremost in my mind when developing this course project. I felt it important to find a way to broach the idea that different forms of evaluation are needed to address varying evaluative questions or purposes. Another concept that I felt needed some attention is the link between evaluation and research. Comprehensive evaluation should employ appropriate research methodologies to answer questions about programs.

Partly due to my own expertise in qualitative research, and also because the use of quantitative methods is more common in educational evaluation (e.g., pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental designs using HESI exams), I chose to specifically focus upon qualitative methods. This course project –which will evolve on the web pages that comprise our blogosphere (an online community comprised by our blogs)– can be considered a form of participatory evaluation that employs qualitative research methods to answer the following question: What is the lived experience of being a student in TWU’s online MSNE program? These blogs will be used to explore your experiences in the program. Together, we will identify themes that emerge out of students’ stories and craft those stories/themes into an account of the MSNE program experience.

As briefly mentioned above, this project has several major purposes/goals:

• To provide students an opportunity to participate in real educational evaluation
• To experientially demonstrate the link between evaluation and research
• To expose students to the use of qualitative research methods for evaluative purposes
• To evaluate the experiences of students enrolled in TWU’s MSNE program

You’ll notice that these are not written as instructional objectives. I have not suggested that “The student will…” anywhere. These are the goals for this project, but you will not be evaluated on whether you have achieved specific learning objectives. For this portion of the course, I want you to feel free to discuss your own experiences in the program and to interact with your classmates regarding their experiences. Journal entries will be due once per week; so long as you make appropriate entries and participate in a larger discussion of the experiences of your peers, you’ll be given full credit. Of course, it is my hope that you find my own entries about educational evaluation valuable, and that they stimulate you to wonder further about the role that educational evaluation does or does not play in education. In the end, however, the essential requirements of this course project are quite simple: reflect, write, and discuss.

For the moment, take some time to explore your blogs. Check out the Eval Blog tab on your Blackboard course menu for more information about getting started with your blogs. After I receive everyone's blog address by email, I'll update this page with links to all of your blogs so that they're easier to navigate.