Inter-university collaboration in the development of a distance education course in community health nursing

Collaboration between faculty members from two university nursing programs has successfully produced an introductory community health nursing course for RN-BScN distance education students. The course has integrated theoretical and clinical components organized into a coherent whole via a detailed course manual. The course is designed to be flexible so that individual units of the course manual can be reorganized as needed to fit the curriculum requirements of the co-authoring university. The process of collaboration was both frustrating and satisfying. The frustrations included unavoidable difficulties as well as problems that, now that they have been identified, could be avoided in future. The greatest satisfaction, of course, was that of actually achieving a worthwhile goal despite the obstacles that presented themselves during the course development process.