39th Annual Meeting

April 10 - 14, 2013

This symposium will provide an overview of important quality initiatives for online education experienced by an online Nurse Practitioner (NP) education program that has been in existence for fifteen years and is ranked among the top five distance learning programs for NPs in the country. The presenters will discuss four areas:

1. Incorporating Quality Matters^TM  (QM) into online curricula: An overview. Quality Matters^TM  is a continuous improvement model for assuring the quality of online courses using a faculty review process. This presentation will highlight the QM program and the challenges and opportunities in incorporating this program to improve an online NP curriculum.
2. Incorporating Quality Matters^TM  (QM) into online curricula: Course examples. This presentation will use a course example from the experience of incorporating the QM program to improve an online NP curriculum with specific examples and lessons learned.
3. A knowledge management and continuous quality improvement (CQI) process for NP online education. This presentation will discuss a newly incorporated process that has been initiated in this online NP program to evaluate each course at the end of each semester and incorporate changes and revisions into future courses
4. Ensuring clinical competence and quality using standardized patients. This presentation will highlight the challenges and opportunities this program has experienced in using standardized patients with online students when they come in for intensive weeks of clinical content on campus.

Lecture, powerpoint presentations, online demonstration, discussion and interactive audience participation will be used to highlight the techniques and activities, curriculum innovations presented. At the end of the four presentations the presenters will encourage feedback and discussion with the audience on quality improvement efforts in an online NP program. An important focus of this interactive session will be to assist other programs to adapt the lessons learned from this presentation to their own NP programs.