By Lori Rietze and Angie Lim, Doctoral Students
As four students from the first cohort of distributed PhD nursing students at the University of Victoria, we submitted a manuscript that has been accepted for publication by the Canadian Journal of Higher Education, wherein we share our experiences to date. In this paper, we begin by capturing what some may call an educational crisis in nursing, where increased retirements are disproportionate with the number of PhD graduates entering academia.
Currently, most nursing PhD programs in Canada require full-time onsite residency. As such, we advocate that a mix of distance and residency periods (known by some as distributive delivery) offers unique opportunities for PhD nursing education to geographically distant registered nurses. In this paper, we share our perception of the benefits and challenges inherent in our experience of distributive delivery.
Identified benefits are increased flexibility and accessibility to a diverse cohort of students, continuance of one’s nursing employment, heightened accessibility to national and international nursing faculty as well as researchers using online interfaces, and enhancing one’s personal capacity related to distance education and the use of online modalities. We also identify challenges that we have encountered in our experience with distributive delivery.
Some of our challenges include identifying a supervisor, establishing and maintaining a relationship with one’s supervisor, increased technological dependency in learning, an over-reliance on text and presentations as a basis for learning, limited free-flowing discussion, funding limitations, and inadequate opportunities for networking with faculty and other students. We feel that future research may focus on how graduate students can be best supported while studying at a distance.
Acknowledgement: We acknowledge Sue Kurucz and Mindy Swamy who co-authored the manuscript upon which this summary is based.
From the 2014 Spring Communiqué — Student Issue
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