When it rains, it pours

Sometimes things go smoothly, and other times, not so much. So it is with scholarship. I was excited to start out this semester in large part due to this evaluation project, but it's proven to be fraught with difficulty. First, a number of students missed the Evaluation Blogs course menu item and did not create blogs for the class. Next, a hurricane has disrupted the entire city of Houston. Fortunately, it appears that everyone in the class is safe and sound, though many have experienced significant chaos in various parts of their lives and schedules. I am left feeling somewhat torn between my sense of professional purpose and personal compassion for students who have been affected by the hurricane, but if there's one thing that teaching nursing has taught me, it's how to roll with the punches and make the best of a bad situation.

Our initial intent of this project was twofold: 1) to provide practical experience with naturalistic educational program evaluation, and 2) to expand the evaluative study of our own MSN-NE program for the purposes of informing our own decisions about revision and changes with the program. Additionally, as always, there are scholarship opportunities. We approached the project with a fairly general research question: What does attending TWU's MSN-NE program mean to students enrolled in the program? We set out to learn what meaning students constructed of their experiences in our program, but qualitative inquiry (in general, and narrative inquiry specifically) doesn't always doggedly persist in studying the initial research question when initial findings point in another direction. Narrative inquiry follows the stories that participants -or in this case, evaluands- lead us, and it is with that in mind that I offer a diverging branch of inquiry for this class project.

Hurricane Ike tore the daily schedules of Houston students' lives asunder. Those who escaped any direct harm were at least inconvenienced, and the difficulties related to traffic, work scheduling, family concerns, and everything other part of their lives have temporarily -but necessarily- made school a luxury rather than a priority. Students interface differently in an online program than in a more traditional, face-to-face program, and I can imagine both sides of this coin. While schedules may not be interrupted due to the ability to engage in class online, there may also exist a greater expectation for students to continue to work on their courses in times of stress due to the general self-directed schedule of online education. Students in face-to-face classes could not attend class because the campus was closed, but those in an online programs may well feel compelled, internally and/or externally, to continue to engage in their courses despite the calamitous goings-on in their environments.

In any event, the hurricane has surely affected each of us in multiple ways, and this seems like an important and fortuitous occasion for us to explore these experiences in the context of online educational programs. So, let us add an additional line of inquiry to our evaluative study of your experiences in this online program: What has attending TWU's online MSN-NE program during a semester punctuated by a devastating hurricane meant to students enrolled in the program? Those in Houston have surely been affected quite directly, but the rest of us must have also felt some impact upon our lives as a professional nurses, students, family members, and humans. Let's explore these experiences and their meaning to us together as part of this project.