Welcome!

Why This Work Matters: 

As online nursing education continues to expand, ensuring that students feel seen, supported, and valued remains a challenge. While flexibility and access are strengths of virtual learning, they can come at the cost of personal connection. Caring Online Matters® was launched to explore how faculty caring behaviors influence the quality of online nursing education and to help re-center empathy and connection in virtual teaching practices. 

  

Grounded in Watson’s Theory of Human Caring, this work aims to identify behaviors that make students feel supported in online spaces. Our goal is to translate those insights into practical tools that enhance teaching and improve student experiences. 

  

What We’re Currently Doing: 

This ongoing, multi-phase project investigates how nursing faculty define and prioritize caring behaviors in fully online courses. Through a mixed-methods survey informed by a previous scoping review, we are gathering both quantitative data and open-ended responses from faculty across institutions. 

  

The survey includes Likert-scale items reflecting key behaviors from the literature, as well as space for narrative input. This approach allows us to analyze patterns while also elevating the voices of educators themselves. 

  

What We’re Learning: 

Preliminary results show strong agreement among faculty on the importance of behaviors such as personal connection, empathy, and encouraging student success. These findings affirm the value of humanistic teaching practices in online settings, while also highlighting areas where faculty differ in how they approach caring behaviors. 

  

We are continuing to collect and analyze responses to better understand these patterns and refine our future recommendations. 

  

Future Steps: 

Our pilot work serves as the foundation for a larger initiative aimed at promoting student-centered, relational teaching in online nursing education. Based on what we learn, we will develop a theory-guided rubric to help faculty consistently demonstrate caring behaviors in virtual environments. 

  

Our long-term vision is to create a certification-style framework, inspired by programs like Quality Matters™, that evaluates online course quality through a caring lens. This work has the potential to elevate online nursing education by supporting instructional consistency, strengthening faculty development, and improving student outcomes.