Loyola's agreement with the VA required the agency to set up precepted sites wherever the student was, and the school would monitor the clinical learning. In many cases our faculty drove to remote clinics to assess students. But it wasn't that different from our frontier midwifery programs of the past. The AACN task force identified several areas, particularly cost, that may pose barriers to distance programs. In addition to up-front equipment and infrastructure are the expenses of building or licensing software, developing courses, marketing, technical support and creating backup teaching materials in case of technical failure.
Many schools turn to state or federal funding for their programs.
Other key questions schools must face involve ownership and copyright, privacy of educational dialogue and related legal and ethical issues that require continued clarification. Some schools, like Phoenix, give ownership of all curricula, virtual or otherwise, to the institution. Others cede control to the authoring faculty. The bottom line is that nursing schools must craft forward-thinking ownership and privacy policies prior to developing distance education programs. You have to drum up business first.