Working in Increasing Isolation? How an International MOOC for Career Professionals Supports Peer Learning across Distance

In this contribution we provide an assessment of an international MOOC that was designed specifically for professionals in employment services and career guidance. The six-week course was implemented in the context of a wider spanning project on the study of professional identity transformations and was building on the experience of smaller courses provided in closed organizational settings. By opening up the course and transferring it into a MOOC format, almost 90 professionals from around 20 countries were able to share their work experiences and discuss challenges in their daily work related to demographic change, digitalization and organizational change. Amongst the most active contributors were those participants, who were confronted with an increasing isolation at work: being either placed in remote areas, part of a distributed team or a “functional” island. For them, learning from and with others as part of an online community, becomes increasingly important, as reflected by the participants’ feedback and their comments during the course. The analysis clearly stresses the importance of the exchange of experiences with colleagues and peers. While tutor input was also appreciated, participants especially appreciate the learning from their peers. A MOOC or online community can serve an important role in collaborative reflection and social learning. Given this experience, MOOCs could be offered specifically for certain professions where people work in isolation, either in geographical terms or in terms of the topics they are covering

Part-Time Clinical Nursing Instructors’ Experiences of Seeking Peer Support

A well-documented shortage of nursing faculty is a key contributor to the ongoing shortage of nurses in the United States. Part-time clinical nursing faculty play a key role in preparing prelicensure nursing students for clinical practice. These part-time faculty have reported a perceived lack of peer support in the academic workplace. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the perceptions of novice part-time prelicensure clinical nursing faculty as they sought peer support to transition into the educator role. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, as applied by Moustakas, and Illeris’s three dimensions of learning model informed this study. A sample of six novice, prelicensure nursing faculty participants was obtained through social media recruitment. Data from individual, in-depth, semistructured interviews were analyzed using the transcendental phenomenological method. Seven textual themes emerged: solo, harmony, learning the part, discord, listening, ensemble, and writing a new song. Participants expressed the need for support to succeed in their work. Faculty peers were the most accessible and preferred sources of support and were perceived as role models by the participants. This study adds to the current knowledge of workplace relationships by reinforcing that peers in the workplace have a powerful impact on one’s identity, psychological stability, job performance, job satisfaction, and retention. The study results may contribute to positive social change in the working lives and teaching longevity of nursing faculty. Future researchers should focus on perceptions of senior nursing faculty and program administrators regarding barriers to, and facilitators of, peer support provision for novice nursing faculty in the academic workplace