McDonald receives NEAT award to advance online education in health care

At a time when the nation is faced with the looming nursing shortfall, Jeannette McDonald, associate faculty at the UW-Madison School of Nursing (SoN), is leading a national project to make nursing education more accessible online, especially for the working adult student, and to educate new health care professionals with greater efficiency.

The NEAT project, an acronym for “Nursing Education and Technology,” is a $485,000 grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) of the U.S. Department of Education. Its thrust is to advance distance education in health care by developing and testing academic content modules offered online that can be shared among different courses, institutions and educational settings across the country.

McDonald and the SoN have teamed up with five other nursing schools—Indiana University, University of Detroit-Mercy, Arkansas State University, University of North Dakota and the University of Kansas—plus the Association of Academic Health Centers, to expand distance learning.

“This national team is being asked to take the next step in the evolution of distance learning, says McDonald, “developing smaller units of content that can be assembled into different formats, shared among institutions and tailored for specific groups of students.”

The NEAT team will focus on health disparities and patient safety—two topics, notes McDonald, that are useful for several health professions. Linda Baumann, professor of nursing at SoN, will be heavily involved with the development and content relating to health disparities because of her expertise in behaviors that influence health promotion within specific populations. Baumann’s research has focused on health disparities in race, ethnicity and income in relationship to healthy lifestyle changes in diet and physical activity.

“This is the new frontier in distance learning,” states McDonald. “If we can create modules of learning that instructors around the country can plug into their courses, we have a much more efficient system of educating people in all the health care disciplines.”