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Virginia Tilden, D.N.Sc., dean of the UNMC College of Nursing. |
The award is given in honor and recognition of a department or unit within the university system that has made a unique and significant contribution to the teaching efforts of the university. In addition, the award recognizes the recipient for outstanding esprit de corps in its dedication to the education of students at the undergraduate, graduate or professional levels.
The college, which is based in Omaha, has divisions in Scottsbluff, Kearney and Lincoln. The college will receive $25,000, and faculty members will be honored at an award luncheon this spring.
“I am proud of the teaching accomplishments of the College of Nursing,” said UNMC Chancellor Harold M. Maurer, M.D. “The faculty has an unwavering commitment to high standards. The college has established a reputation across the state and beyond for its educational excellence, particularly in distance education. This, along with its partnerships with health care professionals and institutions across the state, and community clinics that reach out to the underserved, all benefit our students and the state.”
The college is credited for leading the way at UNMC in the use of innovative technology to deliver instruction to students at a distance, including throughout Nebraska, regionally, nationally and internationally. The college, which also is beginning to extend the distance programs to urban students, employs about 100 faculty members in Omaha, Scottsbluff, Kearney and Lincoln, and offers all or part of 66 courses online. About half of the college’s students are enrolled in distance education programs.
Distance education programs, which were born from the need to serve rural Nebraskans, now serve as a key instrument in the effort to resolve the nursing shortage.
“This award is quite an honor. Our faculty have earned the recognition,” said Virginia Tilden, D.N.Sc., dean of the UNMC College of Nursing. “As new dean of the college, I am delighted to have the college’s outstanding teaching programs honored with this award. I was drawn to and assumed this deanship because of the college’s national reputation in teaching and research.
“Clearly, the faculty, under the leadership of the former deans, has accomplished state-of-the-art educational programs that reach throughout Nebraska and neighboring states. Faculty consistently bring to their teaching a passion for the profession of nursing, and an incredible flexibility necessary to deliver educational programs from baccalaureate through Ph.D. levels in a mixture of traditional and distance methods.”
The award also acknowledges the faculty’s quality instruction in its bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels of education, as well as its outreach efforts across Nebraska that provide students experiences in community health settings and diversity.
In the past five years, college officials say many “brick and mortar” classrooms have been replaced by “virtual” classrooms. At UNMC, college faculty members were the first to adapt their instruction to the medium of interactive television more than 25 years ago. The college has obtained six multi-year grants, and in the past nine years, has yielded more than $8.5 million in federal training grants to fund their efforts to extend programs to students not able to attend class at one of its four divisions.
Michelle Ellermeier of Minden is enrolled in a specialty degree through distance education. She works as an evening house supervisor and infection control coordinator for the Perkins Pavilion, Good Samaritan Village in Hastings, a 196-bed nursing facility.
She said distance technology tools have allowed her to pursue a master’s degree specialty. “Distance learning and the Internet has made it possible for me to be enrolled,” Ellermeier said.
“From the start, I’ve been consistently challenged and expanded my knowledge and understanding of health care systems, management and the role of the nurse,” Ellermeier said. “I have developed and led educational in-services at my facility on pain management, helping our caregivers share and learn how to better evaluate and treat our residents’ pain. The knowledge also has given me a better understanding of health care financial management; and in this era of decreasing Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, I find these lessons crucial. Leadership is extraordinarily challenging in a time of cost-cutting, and having the ability to incorporate the concepts of employee empowerment and systems’ thinking into our day-to-day workplace has helped to improve our employee’s job satisfaction and increase efficiency.”