Innovation in Nursing Education, Scholarship and Leadership
The University of Northern Colorado's National Institute for Nursing Education & Scholarship (NINES) impacts and facilitates scholarly resources and leadership for effective, high-quality health professions education in the 21st Century. NINES engages nursing educators and scholars in research, professional development and policymaking with the Nursing Research Center, Learning Resource Center, Faculty Development Center and Assessment and Evaluation Center.
National Institute for Nursing Education and Scholarship (NINES)
The youngest entity on campus, as well as within the School of Nursing, is the National Institute for Nursing Education and Scholarship (NINES). The NINES was initiated with a $420,000 federal grant from Health Resources Services and Administration (HRSA) in August of 2008. the grant primary investigator and Institute Director is Debra Leners and the project manager is Dr. Donna Bottenburg. The competitive NINES Doctoral Fellow position was awarded to Ms. Karen Gorton, a UNC nursing doctoral candidate. Karen has led numerous initiatives through the NINES and is a “shining star” of our doctoral program. It is the mission of the Institute to provide scholarly resources and leadership for an effective, high quality 21st Century health education workforce. The purpose of the NINES is fourfold; 1) engage in scholarly exploration and promotion of best-practice approaches to nursing education. 2) facilitate the utilization of evidence-based pedagogy and teaching-learning strategies in the delivery of nursing education models 3) enable scholarly exploration of best practice approaches to recruitment, professional development and retention of the health education workforce and 4) to provide resources to effectively enhance teaching-learning, scholarship and leadership in nursing education. Due to the increasing number of fully-online programs in nursing nationally, the Institute has also initiated the implementation of Quality Matters, a set of standards and rubrics for quality assurance of online education. Since August 2008 the Institute team has submitted 4 additional external grants proposals, two of which have been funded. The vision is to position the Institute as a resource and repository for nursing educational research, best practice design of education delivery, teaching-learning pedagogy, doctoral monographs, and high-low fidelity teaching-learning techniques.