The learning collaboratory: a knowledge-building environment for nursing education

As we approach the 21st century, higher education must face many challenges. One challenge is the transformation of education from a teacher-focused to a learner-centered model. To accomplish this learner-centered model, several learning strategies are proposed to create socially relevant, distributed, and modular courses. This project creates a Learning Collaboratory whose overall goals are to build a knowledge-building environment for students to learn about nursing and to serve as a future global model for nursing education and interdisciplinary coursework. To begin this transformation, the research sequence for the graduate program was selected as the first pilot. This paper describes the analysis, redesign and implementation of the existing research courses during the 1996-1997 academic year.