---

E-mail to a friend | Print This | Select Text Size:

Rio Salado College in Phoenix launches onlinepre-licensure nursing program

After he was downsized and outsourced three times in two years, Tom Butler decided it was a good idea to leave the high-tech industry. He is now studying nursing, but continues to work full time, thanks to an online associate degree program at Rio Salado College, part of the seven-college Maricopa Community College system in Phoenix.

“Rio Salado gives me the flexibility to be able to work and travel for my job and still maintain classes,” says Butler.

The program combines online didactic courses with clinical hours at area hospitals. “A lot of our students are people seeking a second vocation, who have families and jobs,” says Maria Quimba, RN, MA, Rio Salado’s clinical coordinator. “This makes it easy to do classwork whenever it is convenient. It is an outlet for nontraditional students. We’re targeting those familiar with and comfortable with an online format — independent and mature learners who don’t necessarily need the classroom setting to understand the concepts.”

Kevin Henscheid works in the semiconductor field and travels all over the world. “My main reason for going online is scheduling. I can do the work whenever I want, on an airplane, or in a hotel. I can turn homework in from Europe or Asia.” Henscheid did all of his pre-requisites and co-requisites online as well.

The online format also offers students a wide range of resources through links to models, interactive tools, floor simulations, and simulated nursing interactions. “Essentially it is taking the student and opening up different places they can get the information, not just from an instructor,” says Quimba. “It is a broader perspective, not just one dimensional. There are a lot of things you can do on the computer that may not have been available before.”

Nursing student Dianne DeNardo, a veterinary research technician in a biomedical research lab, says, “You actually end up looking up more resources than what you were told to for the class. You end up learning more. In a classroom, you can’t ask [instructors] to repeat themselves, and online you don’t have to; you just read it over and over again. The ability to self-pace is really nice.”

Students do clinical rotations on weekends at local facilities partnered with the program, which has created additional availability. “We have a lot of people who want to become nurses and the facilities to teach them,” says Quimba, “but not enough clinical settings. There are limitations in those facilities. Working with students on the weekends opens doors, because students from other institutions aren’t competing for those slots. In a traditional setting, you may have 30 students because you have that many seats. But with this program, you can have students all over.”

A site coordinator and clinical instructors are employed by the facilities themselves. “Who better to understand the way the facility works on a daily basis? Students are working alongside faculty who are familiar with that facility and in tune with the care it provides, so they are giving the best possible care,” says Quimba.

Rio Salado has always been a distance-learning college, with only one building in Tempe, Ariz., but some 40,000 students. In September 2002, the college asked Anne McNamara, RN, PhD, now its nursing faculty chair, to translate Maricopa’s nursing curriculum into an online program. “A solid curriculum existed and was in use at six of the colleges in the Maricopa district,” she says. “My challenge was to translate it into a distance-learning format.” The first students started in fall 2003, with 27 RNs graduating in May 2004. The program goes straight through four semesters, without taking the summer off.

“Rio uses an adjunct faculty model, with only 28 full-time faculty and about 800 adjunct, some 40 currently in nursing,” says McNamara. “The model has evolved so that I can only exist in partnership with hospitals.”

Clinical experience

Kori Fine, RN, clinical faculty for the program at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Phoenix, coordinates clinical experiences at that facility, determining where students will work and with whom. “The college coordinates the didactic portion with what students will do in clinicals,” she says. The VA provides med/surg and psychiatry rotations, and St. Joseph’s Hospital provides med/surg, obstetrics, and pediatrics.

Clinicals are also an opportunity for students and the hospitals to check each other out as potential employees and employers. Another advantage for partner facilities is career advancement for staff who serve as clinical faculty, through a free online course Rio Salado offers its partners on clinical teaching in nursing.

Of course, online learning isn’t for everyone. “It is for those who have some discipline already,” says DeNardo. “If you’re not a reader, not good at meeting your assignments, and [tend to waste time], it isn’t for you. You are working alongside the instructor rather than just doing what you’re told. I think it indirectly teaches you leadership.”

The format can isolate students, but classes have formed study groups. DeNardo’s has become kind of a family, she says. “We share our stresses and clarify things for each other. Our instructors sometimes join us, or we use them as resources if we’re stuck.”

A number of online RN-to-BSN programs exist, but McNamara wasn’t aware of comparable pre-licensure programs when establishing Rio Salado’s. Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, started an online version of its RN curriculum in fall 2003, offering four levels that students have up to one year each to complete. Students there are matched individually with an RN for clinicals.

McNamara sees unlimited potential in the online approach. “There’s no reason this model can’t work anywhere,” she says. “The key is finding hospital partners who see the potential and recognize that the quality of online education is just as good as the traditional classroom. Only the modality changes.”

Margaret M. Craig, RN, MS, associate dean of nursing at Napa Valley College in California, invited both McNamara and Donna Wofford, RN, PhD, director of Del Mar’s department of registered nursing, to speak at an upcoming conference in Northern California. “There is a fair amount of skepticism about [the online model], because it is something new and different, but I believe it is very creative and innovative,” Craig says. “We have to find ways to get more people into nursing, and I think we will see it happening more. My expectation is that as people learn more, online programs will become more accepted.”

---

Melissa Gaskill is a freelance writer for NurseWeek. To comment on this story, send e-mail to editormtw@gannetthg.