Telecourse links Nordic, Iowa nursing students

	Connie Delaney

A mix of WebCT and video teleconferencing, Informatics in Nursing and Health Care connects students at the UI, the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, the University of Oslo in Oslo, Norway, and Orebro University in Orebro, Sweden.

Connie Delaney, associate professor of nursing at the UI and a leader in the field of health informatics, developed the course in collaboration with a colleague at the University of Iceland, Asta Thoroddsen. The two had intended it to satisfy the University of Iceland’s need for informatics content for its new master’s program in nursing and the UI College of Nursing’s desire to develop international clinical research and teaching opportunities.

But like any good idea, the project acquired a life of its own. Before they were through organizing the course, Delaney and Thoroddsen had enlisted their Norwegian and Swedish colleagues to offer the course to students at their institutions. The project also obtained funding from NORDPLUS, an intergovernmental program to build relationships among universities in Nordic countries, to pay for travel by Delaney and the Norwegian and Swedish students to Reykjavik to begin and end the semester.

Delaney, who has avidly embraced Web-based teaching, sees it as a powerful tool for international education. "You can ask students to read an article about health care systems in other countries," she said, "but it’s much more effective when they can ask questions of one another."

Through WebCT, students not only can access course assignments and readings, turn in papers, and ask questions of the instructor, they can also talk with each other through bulletin boards and chat rooms. The latter features have proven especially interesting for this course, Delaney said. Though most of the dialogue has taken place in English, occasionally students in one of the Nordic countries will carry on a thread in their own language.

And that’s okay, Delaney says.

"I wanted our U.S. students to feel what it’s like not to understand everything that’s said."

Contrary to conventional expectations about virtual relationships, Delaney says, "what’s happened in this course is the more students communicate virtually, the more they want to see each other in person."

This desire was evident in the most recent of three video teleconferences held this semester, in which students and instructors at all four teaching sites were linked in fully interactive sessions. During a short break, students and instructors in the four countries conversed and laughed with one another effortlessly across the time zones, seeing and hearing each other on television monitors.

The value of such commonplace opportunities to exchange greetings and converse "should not be underestimated," Thoroddsen wrote recently in a letter to Delaney. "No matter what technology brings, the human interaction will always be important."

Nevertheless, technology plays an increasingly important role in the catalogue of professional nursing skills, and Thoroddsen believes the course takes participants to a new level of technological sophistication.

"The innovations go far beyond using tools for downloading information or having lecture material available online," she wrote. "This has been about developing skills in acquiring knowledge from ever-expanding electronic information sources, and eliminating distance in time and space, valuable elements for today’s world."

As for Delaney, she believes the new technology has profound implications for the nature of the teaching process.

"If you’re a person who wants to control your classroom, this isn’t for you," she says. With WebCT especially, "you let your sense of physical orientation disappear. You’re in the space created by the students."

Ultimately, Delaney says, Web-based teaching is about empowering students. "Their source of expertise is no longer necessarily you—it’s the world."

Article by Derek Maurer