The nursing department at Northern Essex Community College needed to revise their program to become more performance-based. They also wanted to provide a high quality clinical evaluation experience. Turning to WIDS for facilitation services, they used WIDS software to manage their program information, links to external standards (both state and national standards), course configuration, and courses. After going through the 6-day process, participants were confident in making a "curriculum shift", and valued guidance from WIDS Facilitator Terri Johnson. Final deliverables included revised program outcomes with links to standards, improved course competencies, authentic assessment tasks for all courses, and a clinical rubric. The college also chose to participate in an additional workshop to teach faculty how to develop their own unique syllabi, learning plans, and asssessment tasks.
Northern Essex Community College chose to revise their PN and RN programs to reflect comprehensive performances, rather than regurgitation of facts and information. Working to incorporate National League for Nursing standards and state-mandated standards, the first two-day faculty work session involved review of industy input, definition of general areas of content, and writing course and program outcomes. After this initial meeting, the results were shared with all faculty and deans via webinar. Work session #2 involved a final review of competencies--dividing them into logical units of instruction. Terri Johnson, WIDS facilitator, recorded all results and produced draft courses, credits, and titles for the group to review. The second summary was sent to all nursing faculty and deans, once again via webinar. Finally, the third work session involved writing performance standards for all competencies and producing final reports (both in WIDS and Word format) for sharing. All program documentation, official course documentation, and reporting matrices were finished within the six-day process. "WIDS has experience in aligning over 25 programs in the United States," says Terri Johnson. "We teach people to 'trust the process' as we've seen it work over and over in various disciplines." Terri was one of the first consultants to develop the process in 2002 when she worked to align the 16 nursing programs in the Wisconsin Technical College System. To learn how this process can be applied to your unique environment, contact Robin Nickel, WIDS Associate Director, or (608) 849-2411.