Content area
Full Text
Dr. Price is Dean, Dr. Whitlatch is Assistant Professor, Ms. Maier is Assistant Professor, Dr. Burdi is Faculty Manager, and Mr. Peacock is Faculty Manager, Chamberlain College of Nursing, Online RN-to-BSN Option.
The authors have disclosed no potential conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise.
Online nursing education continues to grow, especially RN-to-baccalaureate nursing (BSN) degree completion programs ( American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2015 ). With the continued growth, online nurse educators are charged with understanding what teaching strategies are effective teaching methods in an online setting. Bain ( 2004 ) has conducted extensive research on what the best college teachers do, and he has developed seven best classroom teaching practices for college teachers to implement in a traditional classroom setting. Despite research on applying Bain's seven best classroom teaching practices in a classroom environment, a gap remains in the literature regarding the application of these specific best classroom teaching practices in an online nursing education setting.
Using the premises of Bain's ( 2004 ) seven best classroom teaching practices, a task force consisting of nursing faculty and administrators at a large national nursing college created an online workshop incorporating Bain's seven best practices. A qualitative pilot study explored the effectiveness of the workshop provided to faculty teaching in an online RN-to-BSN program option. The study also examined faculty perceptions on how the workshop supported their implementation of Bain's best practices into their course sections and student perceptions of how faculty (who attended the workshop) taught the courses. This article describes Bain's best practices and the workshop for preparing faculty to apply these best classroom teaching practices to their online courses.
Literature Review
Brinthaupt, Fisher, Gardner, Raffo, and Woodard ( 2011 ) considered Bain's ( 2004 ) seven best practices and concluded that teaching online makes it more difficult for faculty to demonstrate Bain's practices. However, Brinthaupt et al. suggested that technology is only one part of online teaching; the best instructors use many additional strategies to help students learn. Consistent with Bain's ideas, Brinthaupt et al. concluded that online teaching must be learner centered when considering teaching strategies and technology tools. When contemplating integration of a new technology tool, these authors encouraged faculty to always "ask how that choice will impact student engagement,...