RN to BSN Informational Webinar

The RN to BSN, MSN, Post-Master’s Nurse Practitioner Certificate, and DNP programs at Maryville University are accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, 655 K Street, NW, Suite 750, Washington, DC 20001, 202-887-6791.

Karen Tucci: Hello everyone and welcome to the RN to BSN Completion Information Session. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to participate. Before we begin, we do have a couple of house keeping issues we need to take care of. You need to make sure that you are in listen only mode. To ask questions, you may type into the Q and A box at any time. We also will send you a link of the recording after the webinar.

Karen Tucci: What we will cover in today’s session is we will cover the introductions about Maryville, the program overview, student support services, admission requirements and tuition, and then we will have a chance to answer some questions.

Karen Tucci: Today, who will be on the phone is myself. I’m Karen Tucci. I’m a senior enrollment advisor here and I work with the RN to BSN program at Maryville. Then we also have Ms. Bonnie Stegman on the phone, who is an RN PHD MSN. She’s assistant professor in nursing at the Catherine McAuley School of Nursing in the College of Health Professionals and alum. She’s a coordinator for the RN to BSN program, and she’s obviously at Maryville University.

Karen Tucci: I’m going to hand this off, right now, to Ms. Stegman, and she is going to speak with us, a little bit more, about Maryville and some of the program highlights. Please go ahead.

Bonnie Stegman: Great, thank you Karen. As Karen said, this is Dr. Bonnie Stegman, and I’m the coordinator of the program, so I’m going to be going over a few things in this session. Then, during the questions, if you have questions just come up, just put them in the chat box and we’ll try to answer those.

Bonnie Stegman: A little bit about Maryville University first, it’s locate in St. Louis, West County in St. Louis, Missouri. It was founded in 1872 by the Sacred Heart Sisters or the Sisters of Sacred Heart, so it has a long tradition of being in academic environment. It’s ranked as the top private school by US News and World Report and Kiplinger’s. We also have recently been named as the Apple Distinguished School for 2016 and 2018. What that means is that that kind of distinction is reserved for programs that meet criteria for innovation, leadership, and educational excellence. We demonstrate a clear vision of exemplary learning environment. We are rated among America’s top colleges by Forbes in 2017. What is also very important for any nursing program is its accreditation. We are accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, or you’ll see it says CCNE sometimes.

Bonnie Stegman: I also just wanted to talk a little bit too about the digital world initiative. We’ve really taken heart technology at Maryville and have really expanded our program. In the digital world program, we at the center of learning and we create a faculty student partnership, which is so very important in your learning. We’ve done a large amount of upgrading the technology on the campus and increasing the amount and speed of our internet access. We’ve heavily invested in faculty professional development and learning about best practices to incorporate iPads into the classroom. Which, although this is an online program, some of those at the campus also do work within the online environment. Even though we don’t use iPads necessarily in a classroom setting, even though we’re online, we can use some of those applications. It’s just a very exciting time.

Bonnie Stegman: Again, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the program. Why should you consider completing your RN to BSN at Maryville? As an alum, I want to tell you that I believe it’s the best program out there and it is just to the working adult. I hope to tell you a little bit more about the program, but I want to encourage you that, as someone who has gone through the program, although I went through it before it was online. I’m a little bit older than most of you, I think. I was able to complete my education, my BSN, while I was still working full time and I also had children. It is possible and it’s very very streamlined so that you can do that.

Bonnie Stegman: For this program, the setting is 100% online, which is so important so that you don’t have to be physically at the campus at a specific time. There’s no requirement that you come to campus. If you live in the area, you are always welcome to come to the campus, even if you don’t live in the area, we’d love to see you. Don’t interpret this as we don’t want you on campus, it’s just not a requirement for you. There is no application fees. The program can be completed in as little as three semesters, but as I’ll talk a little bit later about that, it’s not necessary that you have to complete it in three semesters. It’s going to depend on any additional credits that you need. Your eligible transfer credits are accepted, which helps in your general education setting, so it’s very important that those will be transferred in.

Bonnie Stegman: As you know, the requirements for getting your BSN are being more and more put out there, where if you want to advance in your career, you need to have that prior level of education. In some of those, some are popular ideas and settings are included in nursing manager, director of nursing, clinical nurse manager, and a supervisor. Some of the salaries here, that you see, those are median salaries according to payscale.com. Those are averages, so it depends, obviously, on your area.

Bonnie Stegman: I want to tell you, a lot of my students, and I do teach in the program, do go on to either manager setting. Some of them go on to director positions. They may move to a different practice area, go into research, they also might be the beginning steps to go on to do their nurse practitioner, get their masters and even their GMD. There’s a lot of possibilities for you, and as you know, as you have some interest in going into that.

Bonnie Stegman: This gives a little bit of an overview of the RN-BSN program. It is designed for Associate diploma holding registered nursing license, so you do need a nursing license before you take the course, obviously. We can bring in your associate and diploma courses. We will assess your transcripts for those courses and plug them in where they fit in to the program. You will collaborate on expert faculty on research and complete a population health capstone project.

Bonnie Stegman: Just a little bit about that and I’ll talk about it later. That project will be based on wherever you are in your location. It’s in your peer group, and there’s no traditional clinical as you would think of as in your initial RN program. You’ll be able to immediately apply your learning to real world healthcare challenges. We always do research to make sure we’re covering the most current issues that are out there in your practice areas. Then you’ll be able to apply what you’ve learned immediately.

Bonnie Stegman: We will, of course, merge those expanded skills so you’re able to assess patients’ health. I know you already do this, but we let you do a little bit more in depth assessment and just come up with a new and better way to do things. When you do take your research class, you’ll be able to present your research and go on. I have students that, in those classes, they get interested in a project, something that’s going on in their workplace, and a lot of them go on to do even more in that or on another project. It’s so exciting that they get caught up in it.

Bonnie Stegman: The courses are all taught by faculty. We all have been nurses for a long time, plus, you still have about five of our faculty members who are still in the practice area. We even have a nurse practitioner who’s still teaching, so they are still doing their practice and teaching. That doesn’t mean that they are not going to devote their attention to you, but it does help because if they’re in your practice area now, they have that idea of what’s going on, what are the issues you are going to face and how can we help to prepare you for those.

Bonnie Stegman: We’re all committed, both the faculty and staff of the program, for your success. We want to make sure that you succeed in the program. We are going to support you and mentor you as much as possible throughout the program, so that you are successful in your endeavor.

Bonnie Stegman: Just an overview of the curriculum, in total, you’ll end with 129 credit hours, in order to get the Bachelor of Science Degree in Nursing. How that works out is, when we validate that you have a valid RN license, you are awarded 40 credit hours. This covers those nursing courses that you took earlier, so it does give you credit for those courses, even though they’re not brought in course by course, but you do get the 40 credit hours. The program itself has 25 credit hours in nursing courses and then there are 64 credits of non nursing courses. Most of those you probably have received already in your other program. As I said, you’ll have those transferred, detailed. As we talk about admissions, I’ll go over that a little bit more. The last 30 credits must be at Maryville. You have 25 credit hours in nursing, so basically you would take two other non-nursing courses, in addition to your 25 credit hours in nursing, to fulfill that 30 credit hour requirement.

Bonnie Stegman: Just a little bit about the courses here. You can read them. I don’t have to read each one, but I wanted to let you know some things about those courses. The Nurse 307, Transitions into Professional Nursing, is actually the first nursing course in this set of courses that you take. You may take general education requirement courses before that or currently, but as far as the nursing courses, you do need to take that transition course first. However, you can take more than one course at a time, so you can take another course too currently with it. Other courses, except Nurse 416, which is your capstone course, are 8 weeks in length. 416 is 16 weeks, so it’s the full semester. This is designed to give you time to accomplish your capstone project from your culture help community project. What you do is your own community, where you will do a community assessment. You will find out what a nursing problem is in your area and then you will address it in some way, tackling that through the right education, or support, or some project that will address that to a better outcome. We will assist you with that, help you understand how it works exactly. Dr. Diane Perry teaches that currently and she’s very helpful and she will give you a lot of suggestions.

Bonnie Stegman: The other thing I wanted to mention is that on Nurse 309, the nursing research, you must take stats before you take that course, so if you don’t have it already, that could be one of your key free credits your nursing courses that you could take to fulfill part of that requirement. Usually we set it up so that nursing research is the second eight weeks of the course, so if you wanted to take stets, the semester, I’m sorry the semester, you could take stets the first eight weeks and then nursing research the second eight weeks.

Bonnie Stegman: One word about the electives there, we currently have two, Genetics and End of Life. Initially we offered one one semester and one the other, but it seems that we’ve been able to offer both as the same semester, so that you could pick which one you wanted, in case you preferred to do it one semester or the other. Normally those are both offered and you can pick whichever one you prefer.

Bonnie Stegman: Just a little bit about the. I mentioned that a little bit earlier. Obviously with it being online, we start in fall, spring, and summer, so Nurse 307 would start in summer, which begins in May, fall in August, and spring in January. At any point during here, you could start the nursing courses. Obviously if you have something else you want to get done before that, you could perhaps start in the middle of a semester. If you don’t want to start in January, you could start in March, things like that. You can talk to the advisor and to myself, and we can go over that.

Bonnie Stegman: Typically how we start off is in your first semester you would take 307, which is transitioning. 330, which is individual assessment, and 331 which is family assessment. In the second semester, you would take Nursing Informatics, which is 342. Even though it says 308, that’s a typo there. It’s actually 309, we just changed that number to differentiate between the pre licensure nursing classes, so that’s. Then you would get the nursing elective and then the third semester would be Nursing Leadership, which is 404 and your capstone, which is 416. If you wanted to complete other things, within those three semesters, those would be all the nursing classes, then you would add in your two other non-nursing courses. You don’t have to do it that quickly and you have some students that want to do it that quickly, so they do it. Other ones want to go a little bit slower, so maybe they only want to take one course every eight weeks, so that can stretch it out to four or five semesters. I’ve had students that take six semesters, so it’s all depending on your schedule and your life, like what is going on in your life and work. You can see what will work for you. Like I said, you could do it quickly or you don’t have to, you can go a little bit slower.

Bonnie Stegman: Just a little bit about your system, again, as you know it’s online. We use Canvas as our run management system. It’s a really great system. We do have a lot of interactive experiences for you. There’s a lot of time for you to get to know your student, your fellow students. There’s time for discussion boards, messaging, all kinds of ways that you can communicate with each other. It’s fully asynchronous, which means there’s no specific time that you have to be logged. There are due dates for assignments, when things have to be done, but there’s no time when everyone has to be logged in at the same time. It works very well for working and visiting family members and parents and all the other responsibilities you have.

Bonnie Stegman: I have some students that work nights that tend to do some of their work at night, so I’ll see that they’re on the discussion board at two or three in the morning. That’s not required, but it shows what’s available for you, that if you’re wanting to get on there and do your work at 3 o’clock in the morning, it’s very easy for you to do that. You have everything right there for you. There are apps, course management systems, so you can even do work on your iPhone or your iPad. I do recommend doing assignments on the web base on that, it’s just easier for you and the formatting works a lot better. I even do all of my grading in the web base, because I want to make sure that I get this or that to all my students.

Bonnie Stegman: I think I’m going to turn it back over to you, Karen.

Karen Tucci: Absolutely, thank you so much Bonnie, greatly appreciated. I want to remind everyone that if you do have any questions please feel free to put them in the question and answer box and we will get to them when we’re completed with the session. Okay?

Karen Tucci: We’re going to tell you a little bit about the support at Maryville and in the Catherine McAuley School of Nursing. There’s three things here that we feel are very important, the flexibility, the student support, and access to resources. The flexibility, you will be taking eight week courses. Each course is eight weeks and it is every course is three credits. We will look, obviously, at transcripts. If you have transcripts from other schools, we’d be happy to take a look at those and see if at all possible, you are able to transfer any courses over here. We can do that with unofficial or official transcripts. We also have great student support here. How we start out here is you’re going to have a student advisor that will work with you until you actually start classes, and then once you start classes, you will have a student support advisor that will take you through until you actually graduate. You also do have access to many resources here. There is career and professional development. There’s a writing center, technical support. We never want you to feel that you’re on your own. There’s always somebody here to support you.

Karen Tucci: Next slide here, the RN to BSN completion enrollment. Here are the admissions requirements in order for you to apply to the program. First off all, you will have to complete an online application. Just so you know, that application is free. There is no fee to apply. We do require all official academic transcripts from all previously attended institutions. Those transcripts can either be emailed to us directly from the school or they can be mailed to us, directly from the school. For Bachelor of Science in Nursing, you do have to have a cumulative grade point average of 2.5 on a 4.0 scale from an accredited institution. You do have to have an unencumbered, valid RN license. Your last 30 credit hours of your degree must be taken with Maryville University.

Karen Tucci: I’m sure everyone wants to know about the tuition, if you don’t know already. The cost per credit hour is $500 per credit hour. We do partner with many corporations, so there may be a discount that would apply, so when you do speak with your enrollment advisor, make sure you tell them where you’re currently working. Every semester, which is 16 weeks, there is a one time fee per semester of $350, which includes graduation fees, unlimited transcripts, the technology, the writing center, and that is every 16 week semester. There also is financial aid available and corporate discounts. These are things that you would want to discuss with your enrollment advisor.

Karen Tucci: We do have some next steps, after this call, if you’re ready to go, we’d be happy to help you. You can schedule an appointment with your enrollment advisor to discuss the course evaluation, financial aid, application steps, and the admission process. Once your application is complete and all documents are included with your file, you will receive an admission decision from the academic department. If anyone has any questions, they’re more than welcome to type them into the question/answer box. Just so you know, if we don’t get to the questions today, we’ll definitely put you in touch with an enrollment advisor to assist you.

Karen Tucci: I’ll give you a little bit of time to start typing in some questions, and then I’ll go back to those. Just so you know, we are now taking applications for our spring term, which is in January. If that is something that you’re interested in, you would want to begin starting the application process and ordering your official transcripts, and working with our enrollment advisor. I do see we have a couple of questions, so I’m going to go through those. Ms. Stegman, I’ll let you know if I’d like you to help me answer some of those.

Karen Tucci: One of the very questions we have is, “Will my basic applied statistics class be enough?” I will start off answering that, and Ms. Stegman, if you have further things please feel free to add them, but really the best way to find out if that statistics class will transfer over would be to provide your official transcripts to your enrollment advisor, and then we would have our transcript evaluation team to evaluate it from there. Then your enrollment advisor would discuss with you if that class would be able to transfer over. Ms. Stegman, do you have anything to add in regards to that?

Bonnie Stegman: I think that’s the best way to go. Most of the time, if you’ve had a statistics class, they will transfer in and set aside that requirement, but it’s best to have your enrollment advisors look at that to make sure, so that we don’t tell you something that’s not true. Chances are that it would be fine.

Karen Tucci: Perfect, thank you. We do have another question here. “Please explain further on those last 30 credits needed. What are those? 25 credits are nursing courses, what are the rest?” What I can say, from an enrollment advisor’s perspective, is usually we do have to look at all of your official transcripts. Then what happens is you are provided a degree plan in regards to what you need to take at Maryville. That all depends on what you have previously taken, so it’s difficult for me to say exactly what you’re going to need to take. I’m not sure if Ms. Stegman can say anything more on that, but it’s really something that you do have to work with your enrollment advisor on, by either providing unofficial or official transcripts for us to evaluate.

Bonnie Stegman: That’s the best. Most of the time, it may be either you’re missing an English class or a humanities, or some kind of class like that. If you don’t have all those filled, we would use anything that you would need in the general education requirement to satisfy those. Sometimes people have everything they need, so then you would just take-it would be kind of your choice. What is a good class that you might be interested in. I have a lot of students that take women’s studies or they might take music of religion, all those kinds of course that maybe you’ve always wanted to take, that’s kind of well rounded, giving you that true bachelor’s degree, so that we have full requirements of that degree, so that you have a well rounded, and that you have the ability to just get that great education.

Karen Tucci: Thank you so much. Here’s a great question. “Do students ever need to come to campus? Can they come to graduation?” I’ll take that one, and no, you don’t ever need to come to campus, but as we previously discussed, we would welcome you here if you want to come, and yes, you absolutely positively can come to graduation. That’s a very exciting time, and we would definitely like to see you here.

Karen Tucci: Here’s a good question. “How intense is the workload? As a working nurse professional, how much time do I need to be able to dedicate to my studies per day or week?” Ms. Stegman, would you mind taking that one?

Bonnie Stegman: Sure, no. I will. Obviously, you’re still going to need to develop some time, even if it’s online, you still will need to make sure that you’re getting your assignments done and you’re doing your reading and things like that. The nice thing about having an online kind of environment is that you can do it at your own time and at your own pace, and when you want to do it. It does not have to be done by a certain day other than to complete your assignments and your discussions. I would say you would need to figure that you’re going to spending approximately about eight hours a week on it. Some people spend less time, some people spend more. It’s really individual. It depends upon how fast you read, how much research you want to do, on those kinds of things. I just want to encourage you, rather than focusing on time, although that is important, you want to make sure you’re getting the good concepts of it, in that this is very doable. We’ve had successful students have completed the program and believe me, they are all busy. They are all working full time. A lot of them have families. Some of them even have life issues come up, maybe at this time I should bring that up.

Bonnie Stegman: We are aware that sometimes life happens, so don’t ever be hesitant to contact the faculty or myself. We can work with you if you have to delay an assignment for something like that. We are very open to helping you through the program. We want to make sure that you’re successful, so we will work with you. Sometimes it might even be where you have to delay a course or semester, but we will work with you. I want you to know that, that if you’re having any issues I have faculty members that will come in, even review papers ahead of time for you. We’re there for you. We want you to be successful.

Karen Tucci: Thank you so much. I think this might be another one for you, and it’s very important. I’m being asked the structure of the program. What does it consist of, exams, online discussions?

Bonnie Stegman: It’s kind of all of the above. The focus on, I think, is every week you will have a discussion board, where you will talk about a topic that you’re studying that week. You usually have that due. You have your original posts due on a Wednesday, and then we give you a couple of days for people to respond to each other. The assignments are usually due the Sunday of the week. They can be a short survey or a short paper. A lot of times we work through the process for that. Big assignments are chunked up, so you don’t have a big assignment that’s due within a week. It’s more it’s paced so that you can do parts of assignments as you go.

Bonnie Stegman: We have quizzes in the courses. They are more of a learning tool versus assessment, although you do get points for them. Most of them you are able to take twice, and then we accept the highest grade. We try to make those quizzes very low stakes, we just want them to use for your learning, so that you know that you understand the material that we’ve gone over. I hope that answers the question.

Karen Tucci: Yeah, thank you so much. We do have another question in regards to graduation. “Am I able to attend the graduation ceremony on the ground campus or do I have to attend online?” Of course, we welcome you to attend the graduation. That’s a very exciting time. You can bring family, friends, so absolutely. Please feel free to attend graduation. Thank you. We do have one other question, that I think Ms. Stegman’s going to be able to answer. The quizzes, the question is are they timed quizzes?

Bonnie Stegman: Most of them do have a time limit, just to keep your [inaudible 00:32:42] going, but they allow plenty of time. For example, I have maybe a ten question quiz and you have 30 minutes to do it, so it’s not … Other classes might have if you have 20 questions you have an hour. Then again, like I said, you can take the quiz a second time, so if you have any difficulties with times or some kind of accommodation you need, we can talk about that individually, but yes, they are timed, but they give you plenty of time to be able to do them.

Karen Tucci: Thank you. This is a really good question. “For tests and quizzes, do we go to a local university or other colleges to complete?”

Bonnie Stegman: No, the quizzes are all online, they’re within Canvas, so they’re right there, easy access for you. You just go within the course and it’s a tab that says quizzes and there’s also a module, so each week it’ll have the quiz with a link. You just click on the link and you’re there on the quiz. They’re all online. You do not have to go anywhere for the tests, other than wherever you’re at, wherever you have a computer, or an iPad, or a laptop, wherever, you can do the test.

Karen Tucci: Great, thank you so much. Here is one more question in regards to the classes. “Are there online class times in the program or can students sign on at any convenient time?” If it’s okay, I’ll take this one. The course work is available to you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There is no time that you have to log on to class. I hope that answers that question. We’re going to take one more question and if you have any more though, please go ahead and ask. Oh, we got another one here. “Are the exams proctored?”

Bonnie Stegman: In this course, in this program, no they are not proctored exams. We do have you agree that you are going to, that you know that they are not open book exams, but there’s no way. In our NP programs there isn’t proctoring software that does ensure that you’re not using anything, but as I said, this is more a focus of learning. I want to make sure that you understand the concepts that we’ve had during the week, so we do not have a proctored system for them.

Karen Tucci: Thank you very much.

Bonnie Stegman: Did that answer?

Karen Tucci: Yeah, I didn’t get another question, so I think we’re okay right there. Thank you so much. Are there anymore questions at this time? If not, I do want to thank you very much for being on the call today. I also, obviously, want to thank Ms. Bonnie Stegman for helping me through this webinar today and making it accessible.

Karen Tucci: Oh, wait, I have another question, and I apologize. I am going to answer it. In regards to a summer 2019 deadline, I don’t have that specifically in front of me, but we can get that for you. I will get that for you, unless Ms. Stegman does.

Bonnie Stegman: I would think that probably was, if we’re talking about what, a December 3rd, so it looks like probably about a month ahead of time or so, a little bit more than a month, so the summer session starts in May, so I would say probably some time in the middle of March would probably be a good time, around that time, but Karen can get the exact date for you.

Karen Tucci: Yes, I’ll get that for you. I can see who asked that and I will get that for you. That’s not a problem at all, and it’s never too early, just to be honest, to start the application process, because it’s kind of amazing what can happen with transcripts. The application is free of charge, you could go out there and start it today, and pick summer and then order your official transcripts if you’d like, and you could be accepted before even the new year starts if you’d like to, so there’s no time like the present to get started, just because we do come across a lot of transcript issues.

Karen Tucci: I would like to thank Ms. Stegman and everyone who has submitted a question. This will close the Q and A portion of our webinar. If anyone has anymore questions that they think of later, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. If we did not get to your question today, we’ll for sure get an enrollment advisor to follow back up with you. If you will get the resources section on the left side of your screen, you will see a couple different resources available to you. You could schedule an appointment with an enrollment advisor to go over the program or any other questions that you many have. We do want to let you know that the application deadline for spring is going to be December. I believe it says December 3rd, however, it is December 17th, and classes will start on January 14th. If you are ready to go and you’d like to apply, you may do that. There is a link for the online application and we can certainly help you through that process. Thank you again for taking the time out of your day to join us. Thank you to Ms. Stegman. We hope that you found this webinar useful and we look forward to speaking to you soon. We all hope that you have a great day. Thanks again.

Bonnie Stegman: Thank you very much.