Empowering Online Students to Excel in Learning and Leadership

Streamed Session

Session Materials

Brief Abstract

Learn how to engage and empower students to develop critical thinking and leadership skills through innovative and collaborative approaches to asynchronous online course design, teaching, and learning. The strategies we selected and implemented consistently demonstrated positive results and were enthusiastically received by graduate students in several healthcare-related programs.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Kimberly Taylor, University of South Carolina

Dr. Kimberly Taylor is the Interim Director for the Master of Science in Nursing Informatics and Healthcare Leadership programs and an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina’s (USC) College of Nursing. In 1994, she received a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the Medical University of South Carolina, a Master of Science in Nursing from East Carolina University in 2008, and a Doctor of Nursing Practice from USC in 2017. Dr. Taylor served 27 years as a Registered Nurse in the United States Navy and held leadership and teaching positions within the United States and abroad prior to becoming a faculty member at USC. She is a Jonas Veteran Healthcare Nurse Leader Scholar and certified as a Nurse Executive-Advanced through the American Nurses Credentialing Center and as a Perioperative Nurse through the Competency & Credentialing Institute. Dr. Taylor has led interprofessional teams and diverse organizations to achieve unprecedented results and brings her years of executive leadership experience to teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Co-presenter: Vera Polyakova-Norwood, College of Nursing - University of South Carolina

Vera Polyakova-Norwood has more than thirty years of experience in designing, teaching and managing various types of distance education courses and programs. As director of distributed learning at the University of South Carolina’s College of Nursing, she assists faculty with design, development, implementation and evaluation of online courses, modules and activities. Since 2016, U.S. News and World Report ranked the USC College of Nursing graduate online program as #1 in the country four times. Vera presented at several local, national and international conferences and led numerous workshops on technology-based teaching and learning.

Extended Abstract

After a long season of social distancing and separation, it can be challenging for faculty in any discipline to identify and implement innovative teaching strategies to promote student engagement, critical thinking, and leadership skills development in asynchronous online courses. Establishing a partnership with an instructional designer may present an opportunity to articulate and implement a new approach rooted in evidence-based pedagogy and reflective of their own teaching philosophy. Collaboration with an instructional designer, often conducted through remote technologies, can expose the faculty to a new body of knowledge and way of thinking and immerse them in processes similar to those that students experience in online courses. A new course design and teaching approach begin to take shape as the faculty and the instructional designer dialogue with each other.

Our inter-professional partnership grew out of a need to improve the student learning experience and outcomes in online courses on systems thinking and leadership for graduate students in healthcare disciplines.  We focused the new course design on promoting active learning and assessing the achievement of the learning objectives through a variety of authentic assignments. To facilitate student learning, we utilized traditional and innovative pedagogies.

We organized the course in weekly modules and created a variety of learning resources to guide and support student exploration of course content. Learning activities included readings, viewing instructor-produced and third-party YouTube videos, self-assessment quizzes, asynchronous online discussions, leadership reflections with peer review, inter-professional case studies, analytical mini-papers, group projects and multimedia presentations. We carefully balanced individual and collaborative activities so that students would not get overwhelmed with the logistics of online group work.

Both courses started with introductions and ice-breakers. Students were excited to discover that they come from different healthcare related programs, including clinical nursing specialties, healthcare leadership and IT. The instructor led students in establishing an inclusive and caring learning environment by posting and emailing frequent announcements, responding to questions promptly and respectfully, proving timely feedback on completed assignments, and recording weekly videos with learning tips as well as praise and encouragement. The instructor modeled the leadership behaviors and ways of thinking and challenged the students to explore and refine their own leadership values and styles.

Course assignments based on authentic leadership roles in complex healthcare systems provided practice with essential leadership functions (e.g., performing a strategic audit, creating a strategic plan, developing a change proposal).  We used smaller individual assignments as stepping stones to larger collaborative projects. Having several lower stakes assignments with instructor feedback provided students with opportunities to develop their critical thinking and leadership skills gradually and without fear of making mistakes. Larger group projects exposed them to alternative ways of thinking and solving problems, and strengthened appreciation for diversity of ideas and innovation. Working together on rigorous projects, students supported, encouraged, and challenged each other to produce course work that they could be proud of. They felt empowered and cared for by their instructor and teammates.

Another strategy that we used to create a sense of support and empowerment is assessing student learning in multiple ways using different genres and multiple media. Students wrote formal mini-papers and informal reflective journals, created charts and diagrams, and recorded multimedia presentations.

The newly redesigned courses were enthusiastically received by students in different healthcare-related specialties and programs.  Student performance indicated achievement of learning objectives, understanding of course concepts, enhanced engagement, and strengthening of their leadership capacity within complex health systems. We used midterm and final course evaluations to assess the effectiveness of the new course design and teaching methods.  Both evaluations showed increased satisfaction with the learning process and the courses’ effectiveness in leadership skills development.

We plan to share the results and selected student comments with the audience. Tested over multiple semesters, these pedagogies consistently demonstrated positive results. Re-shaping the course design and teaching strategies allowed us to renew our commitment to quality in online education and help our students excel in learning and leadership.

Audience Engagement:

We plan to use the Chat and Poll features in the virtual conference software to make this session fully interactive. At the beginning of the presentation, we will use the Poll feature to ask the attendees if they have worked with instructional designers on online course development.  We will follow up on that information in the Chat by asking the attendees to identify their own disciplines and those of their collaborators.

In the middle of the presentation, we will pause to respond to questions in the Chat. If there is an option for participants to activate their microphones, we would love to have a “real” discussion and elicit examples of engagement techniques for different student populations.

After presenting the strategies that we implemented and evaluated, we will ask the attendees to share in the Chat their methods of making students feel engaged and empowered. At the end, we will ask the attendees to use Chat to identify at least two innovative pedagogical practices discussed in this session that they could add to their current teaching toolkits.

Take-away points:

We hope that attendees will take away the following points:

  1. Creating a robust online course requires collaboration between faculty and instructional support specialists such as instructional designers, librarians, and IT professionals. Such collaboration may be challenging at times but has a potential to lead to innovation in teaching practice and, eventually, improved learning outcomes and experience for students.
  2. Online students can develop critical thinking and leadership skills through a variety of carefully structured individual and collaborative learning activities. Course activities and assessments should be authentic and meaningful.
  3. Students feel empowered to succeed in learning and leadership when they have multiple opportunities to demonstrate new knowledge and skills in a variety of genres and media. Respectful and timely instructor feedback helps students improve performance and build confidence.
  4. Instructors should model effective leadership behaviors, lead students in creating an inclusive and caring online learning environment, and empower them to strive for excellence.