In the process of creating these modules, the university's nursing faculty enhanced their ability to help students to apply ethical principles in practice. The initial grant and a subsequent dissemination grant served a third audience of nursing educators in the U.S. and Canada by making course materials and teaching strategies widely available. The embedding of modules and activities, structured to constitute a single, integrated course, into several separate courses represents a new way of providing ethics education for nurses. This strategy solves the problem of how to give the teaching of ethics identifiable curricular space, but it also allows students to consider ethical issues at all stages of their program and in both classroom and clinical settings. Ethical considerations are thus kept constantly before the students, who are able to address them with increasing sophistication as they mature in their educational experience.
Students receive a grade for a single course at the end of the program.
The units are included in thirteen required courses, eight didactic and five clinical. Workshops at the beginning of each of the first two years of the project helped faculty to become more proficient in dealing with ethics issues and the strategies and mechanics for integrating the ethics units into their courses. The ethics faculty designed learning objectives and teaching strategies for each unit, and evaluated most of the student work. The only material not graded by the ethics faculty was the ethics section that most of the clinical teams added to the care plans or journals required of students in clinical courses. During the period of project funding stude nts received an integrated report of their performance in all the course modules.